ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

It Is contraction = ONLY acceptible use of it's.

(pls ignore my spelling errors, because I know I am right on the its/it's issue)

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000227.htm

possessive of it has no apostrophe EVAH!!

viz: the dog licked its wounds

ditto plural of it ("he ended his avant-garde poem with a whole line of its"

otherwise it would read "the dog licked it is wounds" or "the dog licked it has wounds"

how abt:
Giving feedback to a subordinate helps him learn (her learn). [and then alternate the order]

Grammatically incorrect but increasingly tolerated in my experience. In the version of business English our business uses here in England, no-one would even notice. Except the sort of pedants you'd like to irritate.

Giving feedback to subordinateS helps them learn.

Dilemma solved.

either or'sgood with me

men can eat a bag of dicks

i live for the day i see this in any corporate communication

no, them is acceptable these days, and has been for years

things belonging to Cousin It are Cousin It's

That's what people kept telling me, but I was never that adventurous.

It used to be gramatically acceptable to use a masculine pronoun (he, him, etc.) when referring to a person of unspecified gender (you know what I mean.. I can't think of any other way to put it), but now the "he or she"/"his or her" method is the proper form.

I'm not sure if it makes a difference whether you use a slash or the word "or." I suspect that the slash is unacceptable in formal writing.

Unless it's academic writing, and it allows you to make a terrible pun somehow.

Proper, maybe. But it should be pointed out that if you're having to cram this into your sentence, you;re writing a clumsy sentence, and you should probably drop back and punt.

TS Have you got vs. Have you gotten. Is it yet another GBS US/UK divide?

Friend of mine just told me the exact same thing about “is.”

Oh wait, no, he didn’t, my brane downcased it whilst reading.

TS Have you got vs. Have you gotten

do you have?

have you

Not talking about the sense of possession, more like “have you got(ten) to the part about…?”

are you at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCwMFwvwieo

have you any wool?

What matter have you against me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxO0jo7U4d4

british people don't consider "gotten" a word iirc

That’s changed a lot recently.

You could say they’ve gotten wise to the hip US lingo

ill-gotten is very ordinary present-day uk english (when used of gains, riches, wealth etc)

etymonline.com dates its hip modernity to the 14c: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gotten

(ie like many US variants it's older not newer)

Best word there is sooterkin.

it is a good word definitely

I was making a bad joke fwiw

I'm not at all keen on 'gotten'. But for that matter I'm not keen on 'got' - a very overused, almost ubiquitous word which I don't find at all pretty. As Mark S has already indicated above, it's often not at all necessary to use this word. In James Redd's example, I would say 'Have you reached ... ?'

be careful or you will get got

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Meo9VQKhN-Q

So my state has outlawed individual plastic bags, which means you have to bring your own shopping bags to the supermarket and basically everywhere else to carry your purchases away. I went to a small supermarket the other day on a whim and didn't have a bag with me, so I was forced to buy one for 99 cents. Anyway, it says on the side

"Thank You for Shopping With us!"

capitalized exactly like that. Shouldn't that obviously be "Thank You for Shopping with Us!"?

Maybe they thought it was a two-letter word and therefore should be capitalized? Or maybe it is some weird patriotic thing.

I used to use a free bag somebody gave me from the NYC DoS or some other agency, but I finally lost it and ending up getting a nice foldable one from the local gift shop that wasn't too expensive which I love, although now I am paranoid since I don't have it on me and don't quite remember where I put it.

Should be lowercased, I meant to say.

All lowercase and all caps both solutions to a certain problem.

CamelCase to thread!

all lowercase is always correct

also check yrself once you start proofing plastic bags, there's a lot of vernacular house style out there and you will lose yr mind to no purpose

all lowercase is always correct

thats right

Shouldn't that obviously be "Thank You for Shopping with Us!"?

Personally speaking, I'd lose the exclamation point as making them sound over-excitable and perhaps mentally unbalanced.

Should really be: “Thank You for Shopping with ‘us!’”

Thank You for Shopping with BIG HOOS aka the streendriver

Songs where it’s fun to say HOOS in place of the actual plastic bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFv53VolRj8

Perhaps I will start posting in HOOS case.

DO U see?!

LET ME TRY this on for size.

TS: ALL OF A SUDDEN VS. all of the sudden

Can I use "occasioned" like this?

the publication of X occasioned the first use of some new word

Note that the new word doesn't appear in X itself but appears in a review of X.

It's grammatical enough, and "occasioned" is certainly an accepted word, so I'd say 'yes' to your question.

this usage is uncontroversially fine: if i was bored or being testy as an acitivist sub editor i might switch in "saw" or "led to" depending on context (context = nature of nearby sentences acc my picky sub self lol) viz "the publication of X saw the first use of some new word"/"the publication of X led to the first use of some new word"

gloss: if "occasioned" maybe possibly presents a micro-speedbump for a reader, i think "saw" presents none, while "led to" perhaps implies the fact you note, that the new word arrives a little later than X…

you might also use "prompted"

but your sentence is fine as is imo

Yeah, I think "occasioned" there is a little overwritten and that with a little bit of effort "led to" would be much more readable.

saw (a young person) referred to as a 'third-generation holocaust survivor'

obviously the topic is fraught, but it seems like there should be a better way to describe someone whose grandparents survived the camps

A completely uncontroversial way to say that would be "a grandchild of Holocaust survivors."

And while - as mòokieproof says - it is fraught, it does seem a bit much to imply that you "survived" an event that you did not personally experience.

I am not, personally, a survivor of the Visigothic Sack of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, the Irish Potato Famine, the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the Civil War, or school desegregation.

Maybe (stretching this quite a bit) I have experienced some personal effects from the Cold War and/or the Vietnam War due to my parents' participation in them, but calling myself a "survivor" seems more like stolen valor than empathy and solidarity.

Re: ending sentences with prepositions - if you are editing your wordpress site and have a menu option called 'about' with sub items, there's a link for each sub item titled 'Out from under about'.

There are too many prepositions in out from under about.

If you had an australian themed website called 'down under' and the menu item was 'about down under'...

Oh goodness this used to be a thing in language humor books*, making long chains.

In one imagined scenario, a child dislikes a book about Australia. The child's parent suggests it as a bedtime story.

The child says, "What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about Down Under up for?"

And the discussion goes into an absurd arms race that is eventually infinite; using nested quotes you can always add another ...for?

It's there with "Buffalo buffalo" and "had had 'had had.'" Nerd games

* = yes this was a genre

I remember a language humour book that had a sentence with lots of ands in it. A signmaker is putting up a sign for a pub, THE PIG AND WHISTLE.

The publican sticks his head out the door and says "excuse me, but there's too much space between PIG and AND and AND and WHISTLE". And so the sentence has five ands in a row, which seems puny now, but it was the 1980s and there were fewer words back them. Words and letters were still rationed in the UK until 1958. That's why the second Quatermass serial was just called Quatermass II. At the time the BBC was only allowed to use twelve letters in its programme titles. This is why Watch With Mother was originally broadcast as Watch wit' Moth, and The Perry Como Show was broadcast as Perry Como Sho.

Why twelve letters? Why not eleven, or fourteen? Because "Great Britain" has twelve letters in it. That's why.

Just for fun I asked ChatGPT how many "ands" there are in "pig and whistle". It replied with, and I quote, "there is one "and" in "pig and whistle."" Which is a disappointing answer because it's concise and accurate. I was hoping it would be weird and wrong. And perhaps ChatGPT knew that I was hoping it would weird and wrong. So I asked it why the ambient musician Jon Jenkins is so underrated. Along with David Helping his music tends to be dismissed as new age glurge. Planetarium music. Which is a shame because once you get past the naff titles his best music is evocative, emotive, and technically clever.

What did ChatGPT say? It wrote a short essay arguing that Jon Jenkins is underrated because (a) "light ambient" is a niche genre (b) his music is subtle (c) he hasn't had any of his tracks featured in prominent films (d) he doesn't have the name recognition of Brian Eno or Moby (e) he flits between genres rather than sticking with one particular sound (f) he isn't heavily promoted.

All of which is reasonable enough, although it misses the stark but subtle divide between "ambient" and "new age". They're like Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus. Similar bodies, similar concepts, very different execution. Once again ChatGPT pleasantly surprises me. But can it outsmart a bullet?