Can you spray for trolls?

[icarus]

Can you spray for trolls? Because I've an infestation in Primer to the Dark Arts at the moment, crawling in the margins, chewing quote marks and shitting sawdust.

Oh. Look, now it's replying under the new pseudonym "repentantTroll."

That's an oxymoron, isn't it? *is not fooled.* *deletes review notifications unread*


ETA: Ooo. Good news - my Linguistics instructor is insane. She's crammed an enormous amount of material in just a few short weeks. And it's 200 and 300-level material crammed into the same damned class.

She also makes broad judgements about how language should and should not be used, proclamations that I can't say I believe. It's good to know that echo questions are considered weak questions, but to my mind that doesn't mean I should never use them. While there transformations make for cluttered diagrams, I think they're very useful for say, a Percy voice. Because the alternatives provided are stiff, formal and dead.

There. I said it. I think my teacher's brilliant, but I don't necessarily agree. The written word is first and foremost a reflection of the spoken. /blasphemy

Comments

[absurdwords.livejournal.com]

It's clear to me her approach is too rigid. I think this is partially a function of the languages she's studied: Old English is strictly theoretical, we don't really know how it sounded we can only guess. And French... my experience with French is that it's often taught is a very dogmatic fashion, with tremendous emphasis on correct pronunciation (since an incorrect pronunciation offends).

I think you're right about this. I read English and German linguistics. Both are foreign langugaes to me. Nevertheless, even our English and German proficiency lecturers were always adjusting the stuff they taught to actual language usage. They regularly updated their textbooks. I think that even prescriptive linguistics should take actual language usage into account.