Login Fun
Location: Wireless internet, Starbucks Coffee.
Note the 'You have key in an invalid User ID'. Confusion of the active and passive voices - should be 'keyed', not 'key'.
Location: Wireless internet, National University of Singapore.
Note the 'I am a visitor to NUS, how could I...' . Misuse of 'could'. It should be 'how may I', 'how might I' or even 'how do I'.
Tsk.
posted by Sprezzatura at 4:45 pm
4 Comments:
Singaporeans have a very weak grasp of the conditional tense.
See would omission.
"Could I" *would* work if you were asking someone for permission. That's because it is sort of like a special "rhetorical conditional".
I have a friend who substitutes the future tense with "would" and the conditional tense with "will"!
Also ...
"I have key in" has nothing to do with the active or passive voice, but rather substituting participles with a bare infinitive.
Another Singaporean problem.
Hello Mister Radical, I think we've had quite enough of your superfluous repartees. Do this blog the favour of being quiet, please. Nobody's interested in reading your act-smart criticisms. It has become irritating to the point where nobody really gives a crap about whether you're right or not.
On the contrary, some of the rather posts are sometimes rather superficial.
I support good English, but picking on the wrong things is just going to lead Singaporeans in the wrong direction.
How is my comment any more worse than "Confusion of the active and passive voices - should be 'keyed', not 'key'." which is merely identification of grammar errors.
Not to mention, I have only made comments recently on three posts. I think you grossly misrepresent the quantity of my comments (some of which are basically responses).
Please tell me how you sometimes expect comments on a blog about grammar errors (which is a supportable thing to do) to be oh-so-profound.
It's not about being hao lian or anything. Linguistics is something that interests me greatly and I like linguistic discussions. Perhaps you should pick it up?
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