ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

wait what

"I must have seen it"

Seen would imply past imperfect though, and this was a one time thing?

NEVER use "have saw"

seen is past participle

Have saw will travel. I don't know what's wrong with my grammar nowadays. ;-:

'...must have saw it...' is always wrong. If the thing troubling you is that the box didn't actually fall all the way to the ground before the woman caught it, then you could change it to "I must have seen (or noticed) it falling (or start to fall) before she did"

'have saw' seems to be exclusively an American colloquialism. It is very very very very very very very very wrong, whether American or otherwise.

Have saw. Will travel.

oh d'oh

'have saw' seems to be exclusively an American colloquialism.

No, I think Leeee was just overthinking this. I've never heard anyone say it.

Ok... one I was picked up on by a fellow grammar fiend (Grammar Fiend?) a few years ago. And was ashamed never to have thought about.

"I am ..." (doing something etc.)

Does the opposite construction exist?
"I amn't..."

If so, why do we say "I aren't...", when we wouldn't say "I are...".
If this is subjunctive skullduggery, please use words of one syllable.

Do people say "I aren't..." though? I don't think I do. You would say "I'm not", rather than "I amn't" though, surely.

no one in the history of the world has ever said "i aren't"

Only pirates say "I aren't."

Does the opposite construction exist?

Yes. "I'm not."

In fairness, though: turn the construction round and we do accept the grammatical anomaly, viz:

"It's snowing today so we're going to build a snowman, aren't we?" (fine)

"It's snowing today so I'm going to build a snowman, aren't I?" (certain dialects would say "amn't I" -- I had a girlfriend from the north-east of Scotland who did this -- but who would say "am I not", and who would bother to correct "aren't I"?)

"'have saw' seems to be exclusively an American colloquialism."
"No, I think Leeee was just overthinking this. I've never heard anyone say it."

I've heard "have drank" a lot, possibly more from Americans but also over here, so would not be surprised if other verbs with different simple past tense and past participle were also losing one or the other. Will it always be the participle?

Then again that is probably one of those things that people have been saying for centuries, and I suspect I wouldn't have to look too hard through the working classes of Victorian novels to find some examples there too.

(Apologies to true grammar fiends if I have the wrong terms in this post)

My powerpoint query:

Non-breaking space: don't have PPt here, but try alt+0160 (on numpad).

Non-breaking space: similarly, try alt+0173.

For some reason this didn't work using alt, but if you go to insert>symbol and put them in the box and select ASCII (decimal) it works fine.

Thanks

Today's Times Online - God alone knows whether it was in the paper proper -

Victim waves anonymity after rape at hands of racehorse owner

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5677546.ece

holy moley.

victim waves goodbye to anonymity

throw anonymity in the air
and wave it like you you just don't care

omg the picture of the week: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00482/POTW_06_02_09_05_482219d.jpg

lol trying to think of a humorous circumstance under which that sentence would make sense but no, it's just rong

The first delivery on board a new generation Q-Flex tanker, with a capacity of 211,885 cu metres of LNG, is currently on route to the South Hook terminal in Wales.

So, initially I was just going to change it to en route, but can you actually use that expression like that? ie prepositionally? Dictionary just lists it as an adverb.

Easy to change the sentence to "on the way", but out of interest ...

"I admired the mountain, from which five corries have been ripped out of its east-facing slopes."

This construction seems wrong to me. The "its" is where it jars. I've come across this problem before, but am not very articulate when it comes to syntax. Am I right to think there's something wrong?

It's also that you've got "from which" but then "ripped out" - first you're careful to put the preposition up front, then not.

"I admired the mountain, from whose east-facing slopes five corries had been ripped"?

"Five corries had been ripped out of the mountain's east-facing slopes."

I would ditch the whole admire part or put it in another sentence

Yeah.

also "have" and "admired" are different tenses

"I admired the mountain, from whose east-facing slopes five corries had been ripped"

i like this but it's a bit much

"I admired the mountain, whose east-facing slopes had been badly brutalized by having five corries ripped unceremoniously from their rocky shoulders"

I admired the mountain, whose east-facing slopes had been brutalized when five corries were ripped unceremoniously from their rocky shoulders.

OK YES YES FINE

wtf is a corrie

i still think the admired part should go

xpost exactly. that's the real question

Hahaha I have to find out if I'm alone in this: any time someone on this thread is like "you should just remove that part," I wind up feeling like someone has an exaggerated sense of the power/importance of copyeditors in the universe -- is this just me? Do you UK broadsheet folks really have that level of leeway? Even doing jobs where I've felt like I have some of that power, it's like ... the "re-write it entirely" or "leave that part out" suggestions are always funny, like: well, if I were writing this I'd probably be getting paid more.

hmmm i hear ya nabisco but i think the admired part should go in another sentence, since the most important part of the sentence seems to be about these mysterious corries.

Sorry, I wasn't looking for a rewrite. I can recast the sentence - I was just trying to pinpoint the root of the problem. As hinted at by Tracer, I think it's that the sentence has the corries being ripped from both the mountain and its east-facing slopes.

"I admired the mountain, from whose east-facing slopes"

I am never sure about whether "whose" is OK for non-humans.

Nabisco - I think the job of the UK subeditor and the US copy editor are rather different, not least when it comes to power. Yes, you can rewrite things. If you work a tabloid, subbing wire copy, then it all has to be rewritten to a tight house style anyway.

A lot of the time you're cutting stuff right back to fit anyway, so just chopping out unclear sections kills two birds with one stone.

We often check major changes/cuts with the desk editor concerned, or the writer.

so what's a corrie

It's this thing.

"I admired the mountain, from which five corries had been ripped out of its east-facing slopes."

This is the only edit I would make.

(at least without knowing context)

no actually I lied:

"I admired the mountain; five corries had been ripped out of its eastern slopes."

The fact that the mountain was able to withstand having five corries ripped out of its east-facing slops made me admire it all the more.

(btw this is a corrie)

"I admired the mountain; five corries had been ripped out of its eastern slopes."

Is that not implying too heavily that the corrie-ripping was why you admired the mountain?

"I admired the mountain, from the east-facing slopes of which five corries had been ripped out"

(replacing 'whose')

Is that not implying too heavily that the corrie-ripping was why you admired the mountain?

Possibly. I mean, the assumption is that the corrie-ripping is part of the reason why you're admiring the mountain in the first place, otherwise why mention it?

I am with Que; put the corries in another sentence.