RE: Digital Negatives & PT/PD / language & Grammar Police

[BOB KISS <bobkiss@caribsurf.com>]

DEAR JUDY,
	My bad..."us" isn't the nominative form.  Oh, well.  Has it to do with the imperative or conditional form of "Let us go"?

-----Original Message-----
From: BOB KISS [mailto:bobkiss@caribsurf.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 6:24 PM
To: 'alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca'
Subject: RE: Digital Negatives & PT/PD / language & Grammar Police

DEAR JUDY,
	My guess: The actual subject of the sentence is the pronoun "us" with the verb "go".  With poetic, emphatic, redundancy, TS uses "you and I" to refer back to the subject pronoun "us", all of which take the nominative case so you and "I" would be correct.  Am I close?
	Another case in point, "A preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with".  
		CHEERS!
			BOB
	
	  

-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 6:08 PM
To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca
Subject: Re: Digital Negatives & PT/PD / language & Grammar Police


On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Ender100@aol.com wrote:

> I would have replied   sooner, but apparently not all the posts to the list
> are reaching me—perhaps this is due to the flood of "Karen Emails".   Karen
> promised that she would be back at her desk by January 8, but here it is January
> 9 and they are still   coming through.
>
> I stand corrected regarding my use of the English language.   You are correct—
> I should have said "Dick & me" instead of "Dick & I"—it's not that I don't
> give a dick, I had a momentary lapse in grammar.   Thanks for pointing this out
> to me.   I think perhaps the list should award you the honorary title of
> Grammar Policeperson.

Actually Mark, that isn't true... there are MANY points I am happy to 
ignore, and I daresay I make a few "bads" myself. It's just that this 
particular usage strikes a nerve, because (a) it's so awful and (b) it's 
already so common that even one so literate as yourself can fall into it 
in "a momentary lapse":  That is, the correct form already "sounds" wrong.

Only constant vigilance can protect us now and maybe not even that. 
However, by making an issue, a *public hooha,* of the point, I provide an 
aide memoire; the matter may not quite so easily lapse from memory, for a 
while, at least.

And now a free gift... (a redundancy of course, a gift being by definition 
free, but ANOTHER example of how bad usage becomes normalized). I will 
send a free copy of my non-Pulitzer prize winning book, postage paid, to 
the first person who explains why Sullivan's example from TS Eliot,

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table...

is *not* ungrammatical.  (If you've already got the book, too bad, I'll 
send it to your favorite other, or even your senator.) If there is no 
"winner" by Wednesday midnight, NY time , sorry guys -- I WILL EXPLAIN.

> I hope that my error has not caused any sustained state of shock.

Not at all, Mark. You have, rather, contributed to the sum total of human 
happiness, by way of the general enlightenment.

Judy

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