Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Whitehead  That may be true, but it looks incongruous to me... |
And that's data, too. So is my reaction (and it should be weighted differently, as I'm not a native speaker). I think it's a question of style rather than grammar.
I'm terribly irked by "I could care less", or the American punctuation habit of placing placing fullstops and commas inside quotation marks (in an American publication I should have written "I'm terribly irked by 'I could care less,'. Ick!)
Still, usage matters. That doesn't mean every bit of usage is correct. If you correct someone who's mistakenly written "there" for "they're", they'll blush. If you correct someone for using "I could care less", they'll defend their usage (or shrug at you). That's one difference; there are others that could be looked at (such as social stigmatising by usage of double negations).
I like live language more than rules, so I tend to be quite lenient. That doesn't mean I won't correct usage that irks me, but I'll usually add a
into the mix.
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Out of interest, what do you think of related usage:
The sign reads, "Do not disturb!"
The sign says, "Do not disturb!"
It says on the sign, "Do not disturb!"
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And to those who accept "reads well", what adverbs are acceptable? All of them? Some?
The book is easy to read. - The book reads easily. [Probably]
The book is sad to read. - The book reads sadly. [I'd rather not...]
Hm...