English 101 with Trihan sometimes!

[Mr Flibble]

People who confuse of/have really irritate me, I'd say it's my Number 1 pet hatred in terms of English mistakes.

[Creed Malay]

It's an accent/pronunciation thing, I think.
The contraction of "must have", "must've", is pretty much pronounced "must'ff" in some British accents, and it's a small step from there to "must of".

[Mr Flibble]

Yeah I always figured that was what it was. The reason it bothers me is because it's based on a misconception. It's easily avoidable by anyone who's studied language though, I wouldn't expect a non-native English speaker to make an error like that. (Since they would be aware that have is an auxiliary verb and the sentence requires it.)

[nihilyst]

But yet I've seen it ("that must of been a mistake") used in novels, and not even in dialogue, but in narrations. It quite confused me, but I figured it must be some kind of transcript from spoken word.

[TerranRich]

It's because most people never give a single thought to the logic behind what they're saying. "Must of" doesn't make any grammatical sense, but it sounds right. That's because the "of" should really be contraction "'ve" (which sounds almost the same).

[The Bedminster Incident]

There's a lot of things that are considered incorrect, but still are used in modern language. For example, in German, we are starting to use a tense the German language doesn't actually have, p.e. "Ich habs Dir gesagt gehabt," which would mean something like "I've had told you." There are a lot of languages (especially the Romanic ones, like French) having that tense, and we probably have it from there. However, it wouldn't surprise me if, a few years from now, we would have incorporated that into German.
Grammar is, and always was, a try to normalise the way people talk, a try to find rules for the respective languages. Hence, while it's a good thing to know your grammar(s), one shouldn't be too bothered if other people don't, because the mistakes of today might well become correct with time.

/tbi

[Mr Flibble]

because the mistakes of today might well become correct with time.

And I really, really hate that. When enough people are wrong, suddenly they're right by consensus, and the people who were doing it right all along are penalised and frowned upon for not being stupid in the first place.

[The Bedminster Incident]

Exactly. By the same means, our current grammar has evolved. So you should hate the current grammar as well, not to mention all the ones of the last two millenia.

Seriously. Nobody has ever followed grammar (except for the pedants, naturally), grammar has always followed the people's language usage. That is why language changed, that is why grammar changed, and that is why every generation of language complains about the decay of the next one.

/tbi

[SSH]

So, as grammar follows usage, in a few years the comma will be replaced by the words "innit" or "y'know"

[Mr Flibble]

For the first time in history we have a pretty solid written tradition and firmly set rules for grammar and spelling. It's not like the 18th Century when things were more fluid and spelt differently each time you wrote them. The way we do things now has been recorded and set in stone by the sheer amount of written material being produced.

I know it sounds untenable to acknowledge the progression of language and simultaneously claim it should stop now, but I'm not doing that. There are good changes and there are bad changes. Contractions were a good idea, for instance. But, surely most people would agree that text-speak in a book, or making "must of" a valid phrase (to use the old example) would be a step in the wrong direction.

I live in fear of the day I see the message "Ur post woz editd 4 skul lik spelln" replace the "txt-speak" one...

[Tuomas]

If you were speaking of a noun, that's a singular, but actually consists of more than one persons, like "a mob" or "a band", would you refer to it as "it" or "they"?

And what I'm actually after here, is: If I'm to write something like: "The band was originally formed by mr. X in 1975 though ****** had been playing with various setups in different occasions before."

I know it's a crappy example, but the ****** should imply to the band, not to mr. X, so should it be "it", or "they", is what I'm after. If you get my drift

[DoorKnobHandle]

These are called "collective nouns". Band is actually not one of them, it's always plural. As in:

"The band was originally formed by John McFarm in 1975 although they had been playing [...]"

Police is an example for a collective noun. Whether or not you use the singular or plural form depends on, guess what, whether you're using British or American English.

[Andail]

dkh, the noun "band" can definitely appear in singular. Just think of phrases like "the band is playing" and "the band comes from etc".
Sure, when you refer back to it, you can substitute the pronoun "it" for the plural "they", but that doesn't imply that "band" as a noun is treated as a plural.

The difference between "band" and "police" is that police is uncountable, or a non-count noun, meaning you can't say "two polices".

[Snarky]

Seriously. Nobody has ever followed grammar (except for the pedants, naturally), grammar has always followed the people's language usage. That is why language changed, that is why grammar changed, and that is why every generation of language complains about the decay of the next one.

I don't think that's entirely true. Notions of grammar do affect how people actually speak. First of all, "natural grammar", or the application of a rule to all similar cases by analogy (even if it's a rule you just made up), is one of the most powerful drivers of language changes. People say it in the way that "sounds right" based on the grammar they know subconsciously, even if that's not actually the way people use to say it, or used to say it before (an example of hypercorrection). So the past tense of "dive" goes from "dived" (traditionally) to "dove" (more recent alternative), probably under the influence of an imagined analogy with "drive/drove" and similar words.

Second, explicit knowledge of prescriptive grammar influences how individuals speak and write directly: not just pedants, but everyone. Generally, this acts as a stabilizing influence, slowing down language change, because the prescriptions were based on how people actually spoke. However, sometimes the rules spouted are spurious, but actually become part of real usage. According to this article, the distinction between "hanged" and "hung" (to be hanged is to be executed by hanging, any other time you hang something up it has been hung) was invented by grammarians, but it has subsequently been generally (though not universally) observed.

Similarly, spelling affects pronunciation. "Waistcoat" was once pronounced "wisket", and the American pronunciation of "Anthony" with a TH sound is solely down to the spelling (itself changed from the original "Antony" based on an erroneous etymological argument).

You can actually affect the development of a language by what you teach in schools, and many countries have much more active language policies than what is found in the English-speaking world; France being the standard example. For many years, Norway had a policy aimed at changing standard written Norwegian ("bokmål"), and the associated upper-class/educated Oslo dialect, to be less like Danish and more like other Norwegian dialects (especially the standardized written synthesis of dialects called "nynorsk"), and ultimately for the dialects to converge to a unified standard Norwegian ("samnorsk"). This was to be achieved by periodic spelling and grammar reforms. While the effort was eventually abandoned, it did have a major impact on both written and spoken Norwegian (both in the bokmål and nynorsk varieties).

[The Bedminster Incident]

Wow. That's kind of a new piece of information for me. I didn't know there were actual examples of grammar inventions. (Plus, I never knew the exact difference between nynorsk and bokmål. I always thought that was due to some spelling reform or something, because of the "ny," but never did any research.) Still, I consider my statement "true in the major part of cases." Because that's how grammar actually was created, people looked at how people spoke, and tried to find a set of rules (hence all the irregularities and exceptions).

My (hopefully not too harsh) rant against what I like to call "grammar pedants" (in a general sense--I do not mean to imply that any of the forum members are pedants) probably is due to my experiences here in Germany, where almost everybody complains about how people talk nowadays, using more and more English words and less German ones. Some actually see this as the downfall of the German language. (My standard reply uses the example of "level," the 'German' word for which would be "niveau" or "etage," both borrowed from the French language.)

Still, I can't imagine people who write "must of" instead of "must've" actually caring that much about current grammar, so this part of the discussion might not be as important as I (we?) see it right now.

/tbi

[Atelier]

I have two small questions on grammar, and what better place to ask them than here? First off, when writing an abbreviation for an object, does the rule for using AN if the noun starts with a vowel and A if it begins with a consanant still apply? Is it:

I recently received an ASBO for listening to Classic FM. (When the abbr. begins with a vowel?)
A NASA official has been suspended indefinitely for claiming the moon is made of Roquefort. (When the abbr. begins with a consanant?)

I think these two examples are correct, but is this one?

Chris Tucker, an NYPD policeman, has been running riot through Chinatown with Jackie.

My last question is about which/that, and which one should be used when. Are they interchangeable, or are there actually any rules to discern whether one is wrong and the other is right?

Whenever I go shopping I feel like an F1 driver, weaving through the trolley chicanes, which/that people leave sticking out halfway into the aisle.

PS: I had fun writing these examples.

[TerranRich]

When it comes to acronyms (which are pronounced), treat it like a word:

a NASA official

When it's a set of letters where you pronounce each one individually, pay attention to the first letter:

an HBO movie (an aitch)
an NYPD officer (an enn)
a WTF warning (a double-u)

So yes, your NYPD example is correct.

Which/that was discussed earlier, but after 11 pages, it's understandble you missed it. Usually "which" is preceded by a comma, while "that" is not:

I like to pick my nose, which makes people uneasy.
I have an idea that would revolutionize the pickle industry.

Usually "which" is used for describing the fact that preceded it (the picking of the nose makes people uneasy), while "that" is used for describing the object that preceded it (it's the idea that will revolutionize the industry).

If you changed the "that" in the 2nd example to "which" (and added the comma, which is required), you'd get a whole different meaning, although most people would translate it to the "that" version of the statement.

[Snarky]

When it comes to acronyms (which are pronounced), treat it like a word:

a NASA official

When it's a set of letters where you pronounce each one individually, pay attention to the first letter:

an HBO movie (an aitch)
an NYPD officer (an enn)
a WTF warning (a doubleyou)

The implicit general rule here is that you write what you would say. Unfortunately, people don't always verbalize abbreviations (especially Internet abbreviations) the same way. For example, some people pronounce FAQ as "eff-aye-queue", while others say "fack" (though the latter is probably less common than it used to be). Personally, I would expand WTF into "what the fuck" in speech (on the basis that an abbreviation shouldn't take longer to say than the phrase it abbreviates), though in this case it doesn't affect the a/an issue.

[Calin Leafshade]

an HBO movie (an aitch)

Do we drop our 'haitchs' now, Mr Rich?

A HBO movie.

H is often considered to be a vowel in many languages (most notably french since h is not pronounced and always precedes a vowel). However, English is not one of them.

[monkey0506]

Although the letter 'H' isn't considered a vowel, the rule for "a" vs. "an" is entirely pronunciation-based. You wouldn't, for example, say, "I waited a hour..." You would say, "I waited an hour..."

The letter 'H' is pronounced as Terran displayed, such as "aitch" (<ref>). The name of the letter is not prefixed with an 'H' sound. You don't pronounce the letter 'F' as "feff". It's pronounced "eff".

"an HBO movie" is therefore correct.