There's Good News and there's Bad News

[kerravonsen]

So I found a link to Spock/Uhura awards and then immediately winced at the word "fanfictions". Am I the only one who finds such incorrect grammar cringe-worthy?

Still, I am going to peruse the awards anyway, in the hope that the winners are better grammarians than the organizers.

Comments

[vilakins]

Maybe they just expanded "fanfics" because it sounded too slangy.

[kerravonsen]

But "fanfics" is incorrect too! Because "fics" is incorrect, because all of it is short for "fiction" and "fictions" is incorrect! Well, except for the archaic usage of "fictions" meaning "lies".

Guess I'm the only one, then. (sigh)

[travels_in_time]

It bothers me, too, but I never managed to pin down why until you broke it down here. I was thinking of it as a synonym for "stories", which is plural.

[vilakins]

I did resist using "fic" and "fanfic" at first but they're so widespread I've almost come to see them as separate words with a very narrow definition. I do prefer "story" though.

[watervole]

I hate bad grammar - I can never ignore it.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Going to check out the winners. Love your icon, by the way. :D

[wendymr.livejournal.com]

Actually, that sounds like a fairly typical ESL error, which would tend to make me more forgiving if that is the case...

[kerravonsen]

Oh, I know it's a common error for non-native speakers, but it's also an error which native speakers OUGHT to know better about. And I have to admit that it irritates me even more than it might have a few years ago, because there's a person at work who is a non-native speaker whose documents I was forced to correct - all 150 pages of them riddled with mistakes like "staffs" (referring to the people, not the wooden sticks) and "feedbacks" that it drove me CRAZY. Because he's a professional and he ought to know better.

So I'm rather sensitive to that particular error.

(goes and looks up the profile of the person who made the post)
Well, wadda ya know? The person who made the post is Italian. I suppose that counts as an ESL mistake, then. But wouldn't you think that they would want to learn better English? And yet one can't correct them because they would be insulted. And yet they will never learn if nobody actually tells them they are incorrect.

(sigh)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Strangely, I came across "a staff" and "staffs" in Antonia Forest's very well written Marlow school stories, but it seemed to have been slang specific to that school as new pupils were corrected when they said "teacher". I wonder though if it's used in the UK that way in certain places, though I've never seen it outside those books. Certainly the boarding schools I went to had their own slang, like "scrape" which was a buttered scone for morning tea.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

"scrape"

I still stay bread and scrape meaning bread and butter. I think it must date back to rationing and having been taught to spread the butter very thinly and scrape any excess off I still don't like too much butter on bread.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I thought it might be the butter! A schmear as I'd say. :-)

I can't stand too much butter or marge either unless it's a hot crumpet. I love asparagus rolls but have to check first whether they've been heavy-handed with the butter because I just can't eat them then.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Just checked the OED, staff can be used as a single employee. Funnily enough the earliest use they quote is E M Brent-Dyer, Chalet School and Jo, which used A Staff. The later is more like this one "The Director will introduce the new staff and ask him to say a few words."

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Antonia Forest got it from the Chalet School books since they were the same genre, or it's used in that sort of school. It wasn't here and I went to two private boarding schools (as we call them).

I'd say "new staff member" myself.