As I noted a few posts ago, in his article “The Phenomenology of Error,” Joseph Williams categorized errors by type. Among his more interesting categories, in my view, were those errors that the experts make even as telling us not to (and nobody notices). He also had a category of grammatically correct constructions that sound so odd when we use them that we generally prefer the error.
These categories change with time, since language and usage do, of course. But his discussion of them made me think about the kinds of errors we can and maybe should ignore and, in fact, the kinds of rules we should ignore.
Here are three of my “rules I can ignore” (if I want to). Do you agree with me on these? What are yours?
The “that/which” distinction.
Okay, I don’t ignore it, but from what I’ve seen, a whole lot…
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Thanks for the reblog!
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