A Small Victory

Ooh ooh - good quiz, I got the same!

I received divine ascension to Grammar God as well. Translation for those who didn't do so well: wOOt, I b teh l33t ling0 p1mp.

I, too, am a Grammar God....or Goddess.

I'd like to thank the nuns at St. Mary's, and especially my mom, whose raised eyebrow spoke volumes whenever we let a "me and her" slip out unheeded.

Got the God status,like Trish,thanks to the penguins at St Cletus,St Agnes , St Procopius and my bad-ass, grammatically correct mama bear.

sigh I'm only a master.

Oh, oh! I be one of them grammar god's too!

Heh.

Someone needs to rein in the would-be grammar gods. This "grammar quiz" is a POS. Here's why:

Party Pooper.

I also am a "Grammar God[dess]" - I think it must have been too easy.

I was only a master. But in my defence (or... defense...), I'm Canadian and so I think I should get bonus points or something. We have a different kind of english up here. As far as this test goes, coloUr me unimpressed :-)

I also have God-like grammar recognition abilities. Unfortunately I don't have this sort of omnipotence in what computer people call "real time".

Also I prefer short sentences. Even if they're frangments.

Xrlq

Re #6,
Modern grammar teachers have decided that all that Latin "motion towards" stuff is obsolete and no longer applies to English.

#8 I don't have the test in front of me, but maybe I should point out that political correctness has changed English grammar so that the style manuals now allow you to use a plural so that you can avoid specifying gender. That's a change that happened in record time. So the rules about plurals have changed.

#16

You've got me interested. I HATE the rules I was taught about quotations - they break the concept of quotations too badly. Is there a country where you can put the comma outside of the quotes, or at least put quoted punctuation inside reliably?

Beware the grammar test with poor spelling...

#7. (blank) faced turned a bright shade of red

(OK, it's just a typo, but still...)

A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.

This is disturbing.
You see my formal education only
extends K thru 8 yet I scored
Grammer God.
This leads me to suspect that
either the test is faulty or
all those hours in the prison
libarry :) are worth a sheepskin.

I am a complete idiot! Yeah! Grammer has always been and always will be my bane. Luckily I work in a visual medium.

I agree that the test is a POS (even though I was deemed godlike). I disagree with XRLQ about 15, though. The less/fewer thing is still a proper rule of grammar, and is most certainly NOT widely accepted. It differs from the split-infinitives rule, which is not just archaic, but was wrong when first proposed (English infinitives are not Latin infinitives).

The quote thing irked me, too. There are several competing schools of thought on that one. I prefer so-called "logical quoting", which puts only puts punctuation inside the quotation marks if the punction is part of the quotation.

I are a Grammer God!

(Me fail english? That's unpossible!)

me two are god off grammer! yay!

Ok, I ranked Grammar God[dess], too.

At one time I did want to teach high school English; however, I believe much of my writing skills came from those years (long gone) as an executive secretary (back when that was a profession).

oh... and a ps...

composing direct on the 'puter really screws with one's grammar skills.

:-)

OMG, I scored BASTARDIZATION! And they couldn't just leave it at that. They told me: "You shame us with your speech. Go back and finish your schooling, bastard."

>:(.....o

Hey, I scored the same.

Since I am a technical writer by profession, this came as a relief!

WG

Damn you, IgwanaRob, for beating me to the Ralph Wiggum quote. There's a special level of hell for quote stealers such as yourself.

Anyway, I too am a grammar God. Qualifying for a British passport comes with a stipulation that grammar must be flawless at all times. Really.

I, too, am a Grammar God!

This despite the fact that they included one FALSE, PHONY GRAMMATICAL RULE which was invented out of whole cloth for no good reason, and which deserves to die a long-overdue death.

As you can see, I was lucky not to have any questions involving run-on sentences.

Alright, I'm a Grammar God, too. This quiz needs more questions, so there can be an even HIGHER status, since this divinity thing appears to be getting a bit crowded. Or lower the current gods to mere demigods, or something.

I teach English as a second language and I am astounded to hear Americans speaking on movies and tv programs and the news making so many grammatical mistakes. The most common one is saying - for example - "There is a lot of things." It should be "There ARE a lot of things." I hear this all the time!

Grammar God, thanks more to Latin than English.

Spoons, I've never heard of the "logical quoting" method, it's intriguing. I was taught that quotations with a "he said" require a comma, but it can be a pain to include it every time.

Joshua:
#8: If you're too P.C. to use the appropriate pronoun for "everyone" or "everybody," the grammatical solution is not to use these words at all, or at least not as the antecedent to any pronoun. By asking for "they," the test is not measuring whether you are a grammar god, but rather, an ungrammatical PC God.

#16: I'm not sure exactly what the British rule is. Take this random article from the Independent. The quotes in paragraphs 4 and 6 seem to follow the same conventions as the U.S., but the 12th and last one does not.

Spoons:
#15: the use of "less" as a substitute for "fewer" may not be universally accepted, but it is widely accepted, even by many of those who claim not to accept it - yet say it all the time without thinking. See the usage note on the dictionary entry for few. To my ears, at least, a sentence like "give your reasons in 25 words or fewer" sounds horrendous.

XRLQ:

If by "Widely accepted" you mean "widely-screwed-up," I am in complete agreement.

The only reason your example "sounds horrendous" (as though that were a valid grammatical criterion) is that you juxtaposed two plurals to close together. If you said "state your opinion in 25 words or fewer," it sounds just fine.

Jonathan: that the application of a supposed grammatical rule results in a sentence that "sounds horrendous" to the average native speaker is indeed a valid basis for questioning the rule itself. There is no ultimately "right" or "wrong" grammar in any absolute sense, only descriptively adequate grammars (which accurately describe how the language is spoken), and descriptively inadequate ones (which fail to do so). The notion that "less" can never be used with count nouns is descriptively inadequate, and if applied consistently enough, results in sentences no native speaker would ever utter under ordinary, non-contrived circumstances. That's a problem for the rule, not for the speakers who flout it.

I don't see how the presence of a plural in a separate phrase affects my example, one way or the other. It may well be that "State your opinion in 25 words or fewer" sounds OK in your idiolect, but it sounds horrible in mine. Here's an even worse example of the "right" rule, consistently applied:

What kind of apartment can I get in N.Y. for $2,000 or fewer?

I know what you mean, Chaya. I get the fingernails-down-the-chalkboard willies whenever I hear someone using the phrase "a whole 'nother"

"$2,000 or less" is a gray area, because really, that phrase would not be understood as signifying a number of dollars (after all, who would pay their rent with 2000 singles), but an amount of money.

Think of it this way: we don't ask, "How many dollars does that cost." We say, "How much does that cost."

That's because "money" is a non-count noun. I think that expressions of amounts of money, such as $25 or $2000, signify an amount of non-count noun money, rather than a quantity of count-noun dollars.

I also majored in English and ended up the Grammar God. Big woo for me and you.

Money is a mass noun, but dollar is not. While it may sound a bit odd to ask "How many dollars" something costs rather than how much, that's a problem of semantics and/or pragmatics, not grammar. Normally, the currency is assumed, so bringing it up in the question sounds odd. On the other hand, if someone just got done telling you how much something costs in rubles, "how many dollars does that cost" strikes me as a perfectly reasonable follow-up question. By contrast, "how much dollar(s)..." is never grammatical, as it would be if English grammar treated the word dollars as a mass noun like money..

I'm not even a Gramper God.

My quiz result said "You are the one true Grammar God. We thought Michele was good enough for God status, but you blew her skinny ass away! She screwed up the who, whom question, along with the other commenters claiming God status, but you, you absolute stud, you nailed them all!" Just thought I'd share.