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observing / thor

The WebSocket god of thunder
MIT License
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"Thou shall" is bad grammar #34

Open ssokolow opened 8 years ago

ssokolow commented 8 years ago

Currently, thor's output contains "Thou shall", which is like writing "he hate" instead of "he hates".

The proper conjugation is "Thou shalt". (Wikipedia's Thou page does a good job of explaining this in simple terms. Shall is one of the five irregular verbs where you don't just add whichever of -st or -est sounds better.)

avishekgurung commented 7 years ago

Your topic of the issue also has a bad grammar. Its "Thou shall" is bad grammar but it should be "Thou shall" is a bad grammar. You forgot 'a'.

ssokolow commented 7 years ago

No, "grammar" is not a countable noun, so it does not directly take an article. (What you're suggesting is equivalent to "a bread".)

The only situation where "a grammar" is a valid use is the same case where "a bread" is a correct use... when you're referring to one abstract class among many. (eg. "I'm trying to choose a bread to represent France." "Well, everyone knows the baguette, so use that.")

(In actual use, the phrase "a grammar" is generally only heard when discussing syntactic analysis (A.K.A. parsing), where they'd refer to the language definition a parser is generated from as a grammar.)

fikrikarim commented 6 years ago

Good grief..