I love it when language wonks crunch numbers.<\/p>\n
Last week I was describing to my sister a job offer. She replied, via IM: "It doesn’t seem like that painful of work for $50\/hour." The sentence caught my ear, and I wondered whether it would be acceptable outside of casual conversation. My curiosity compelled me to email linguist Mark Liberman about it. He also found it interesting and wrote a post about it on Language Log.<\/a><\/p>\n Highlights: <\/p>\n Matt’s sister is blazing new linguistic trails here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It’s not surprising that the sentence triggered enough of a WTF reaction in Matt to motivate him to ask about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Conclusion:<\/p>\n I’m happy to be able to tell Matt that I estimate his sister’s sentence to be 424.7 times less grammatically correct than "It doesn’t seem like that painful of a job for $50\/hour" is.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Emily, don’t take this the wrong way. Everyone else, Emily is a great writer, and no I’m not a prick who enforces correct grammar in IM. I am merely a dork amused by anomalous usage wherever it pops up.<\/p>\n Yet I still feel like a cruel hidden camera TV show host preying on private behavior. "Surprise, Emily! You’ve been Language Logged!"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love it when language wonks crunch numbers. Last week I was describing to my sister a job offer. She replied, via IM: "It doesn’t seem like that painful of work for $50\/hour." The sentence caught my ear, and I wondered whether it would be acceptable outside of casual conversation. My curiosity compelled me to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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