Oops. Or, Rather, Hooray!

Boy, is my face red.

Barely a day has passed since I revelled in the arbitrary nature of the English language, and I find out that my example was nonsense. The possessive-before-gerund rule, which I thought perhaps to be the work of some drug-addled, charismatic loon, exists for a reason. My fevered fancies were of this wild-eyed, bedraggled prophet convincing his fellows of a way of speaking that he received from a chorus of trees, but instead it's there for the ultimate raison d'etre for any rule of grammar: to clarify.

Thoughts on My Using the Genitive Before Gerunds

A short while ago I hinted elsewhere about my uncertainty with regard to the legitimacy of the grammatical rule about pronouns preceding gerunds. Thanks to Language Log, the situation for me has become a little more complicated.

For a start, it seems that the rule — if rule it be — is a little more all-encompassing than I realised. It's not just pronouns that must take the possessive; it's nouns, too. This is news to me. I've no idea where I first encountered the rule, but since that happy day I've been in no doubt that it was only pronouns that it applied to.

Sesquipedalians of the World, Interosculate!

Those who've been following such things recently will be aware that the Baltimore Sun recently got some flak from one of its readers about using the word 'limn' in one of its headlines. The latest to mention this is  The Boston Globe, and in their piece Erin McKean suggests that an

element of showoffishness is present in many uses of rare words. It would be peculiar if the all-too-human desire for status — the motivation behind name-dropping, wearing luxury brands, listening to obscure bands, or checking in to velvet-rope places on Foursquare — didn’t manifest itself in word choice, as well

 I'm not saying that this is unfair but it isn't, I think, the whole story.

Welcome

Welcome to Sciencophile, the blog of one lad in Ireland who, it must be said, isn't a scientist. My purpose in starting this is to consolidate all my thoughts on matters scientific, be they heretical, mainstream or just plain uninformed. This is, of course, my way of trying to get a cheap education, in that I'm hoping that knowledgeable people will correct my misconceptions and set me on the path to enlightenment.

This blog was set up as a spinoff of sorts from my original blog, when I realised that my original effort was becoming a bit scattershot in terms of what it was covering. More details on this can be found here.