01.02.10: for the love of all that is holy i am not going to talk to you again you dummy

I am never going to win a pissing contest without the hardware, but I would like to point out that if I stop arguing with an idiot it's not because he's right, it's because he's a damned fool and I would sincerely rather address my cuticles and chew on my plastic straw than waste my breath on him.



Let's just keep this in mind: An appeal to a [false] authority is a logical fallacy. Therefore, when you say something erroneous, but insist that it's true because a) that has been your experience in your 25 long years of life, b) your mom was an English teacher, or c) you studied three or four languages, you aren't correct. You haven't advanced your argument a bit. You have shut me up because I don't cast my pearls at the bar and you have established yourself as a moron in my mind. Now, it would be unreasonable of me to assume you would lose sleep over that, but bar-moron, I would just like the point that out.



And, for your further elucidation:

The difference between "Can you buy me a car?" and "Could you buy me a car?" is the difference between a first- and second-class conditional, which means it is the difference between a possible situation and a hypothetical situation. And grammar rules are prescriptive, dummy. English teachers are not tasked with describing colloquial English to their students but with teaching them how to speak correct English. And while it was probably just heart wrenching to find out that there was more than one way to ask a question when you arrived on Chinese shores after a year of studying the language in the States, your teachers did not introduce you to a dozen grammar patterns every lesson because, in a classroom setting, learning a language is accumulative. You care enough about your job to have an opinion about it but not enough to learn how to do it. If you were smart, I would only have to say this once, because I am not giving you my opinion but the fact of the matter. Your mother may have been an English teacher but it's curious that she neglected to teach you any grammar.

No comments yet