Re: Display or appear (Was: Can "either" be used if there are three or moreselections?)

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Elna Tymes wrote:

> And the subject has been discussed to death on this board before -
> check the archives.

Which sparks an observation: this sort of discussion, like many of the grammatical
ones on the list, is about writing correctly rather than well. If an authority
can't be cited, the alternative is to obtain a concensus.

I can't help thinking that this emphasis is misplaced. Personally, I am far more
interested in writing well than writing correctly. Not that the two are necessarily
mutually exclusive, you understand. Still, if I had to choose one over the other,
I'd choose to write well. And if that means breaking every rule of correctness, I
can live with that.

After all, the early prescriptive grammarians faulted Shakespeare heavily for all
sorts of things - double negatives, ending sentences in prepositions, using "they"
for the indefinite pronoun - yet his name is still more familiar to us than most of
the gramarians'. This seems a clear choice to me.

--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177



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