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How to lose the back of your Toyota
If it’s a Hilux, it’ll probably keep working just fine, though 😁
Hello, my name is Inigo Toyota.
“You killed my Kingdom, prepare to die”
Working smarter not harder doesn’t mean pulling harder to get it out. It means chipping away at the problem, literally.
If you cut the stone around the sword, either to enlarge the crack or remove the piece of stone with the sword in it, you can get it out with slightly more effort cutting the stone, but none of the brute force effort required to pull it out. Which also eliminates the risk of breaking the sword.
These days it’s so easy to cut stone with power tools, it’s not like in the old days where that would be a slow process that would take months if not years. A stone cutting chainsaw can do it in minutes.
Divines said that don’t count. Now England has no king
That’s probably the ideal outcome, let the people rule themselves instead of being ruled by someone else.
me and the boys swearing fealty to King Chisel and Queen Hammer
If the truck’s not worthy it rips the rear axle off
Chain should not go around the axle. Wtf? It’s like some of y’all’ve never pulled your buddy out of the mud.
If ever a truck is worthy it’s a Toyota
An old Toyota, mind you
Seems like Brenda chose poorly
What would be the best vehicle to be king? a delorean would be interesting but maybe too much of an old fashioned tech bro
Public transit.
Come on give a make and model don’t cop out
Well, for iconic English public transit, the Routemaster would be a good choice.
Sorry, you got a Pacer instead.
better than the current rail system in my state in the US (basically none)
The DeLorean wasn’t actually a good car. It was like the Millennium Falcon of cars. It was meant to convey “You came in that thing?” levels of incredulity.
Ford Prefect
But he’s not even from earth
A bullet train.
You wouldn’t say “me has a couple of chains”, so why do you think it should be “me” when you add in another subject?
I have a chain
My friend and I have chains.
Me no speak like a caveman.
Because that’s not how language works. Whether you like it or not, it’s pretty well established in colloquial English that you can say me + another subject + verb, and being pretty well established is all that it takes for something to become accepted language. Of course, you wouldn’t use this in higher register speech or writing, but realistically complaining about it won’t do anything to stop speakers from doing it.
One of the first things you learn when you study linguistics is that language is a highly complex phenomenon and we try to find logical frameworks to explain its usage, but language has a habit of not adhering to the laws we come up with to describe it. If there’s a mismatch between actual use and the rules, then it’s the rules that need updating. And this applies to all languages, not just English.
I’m not a prescriptivist, there’s no denying that language evolves. In fact this might not have occurred if not for prescriptivist meddling in the first place. Notice that this phenomenon doesn’t happen when “I/me” is the sole subject of a sentence. I suspect overcorrection by teachers who insist on the “them and me” rule without explaining the nuance to subject vs object influenced a lot of us. I remember teachers heavily correcting instances of “me and so-and-so” to “so-and-so and I,” but it wasn’t clarified that it’s only for the subject of the sentence. Now we’re flooded with “it’s for so-and-so and I” perhaps because people got trained out of using “me and so-and-so,” even when “me” is the grammatically accurate pronoun to use sometimes.
It’s interesting because pronouns are the only trace of noun case that English has left, which makes me wonder how long it will take for even that to ebb away. We already see people misunderstanding “whom,” though I imagine that word’s on its last legs anyway. Word order is the gold standard for English as far as subject vs object is involved, and “Who is it for?” already feels more natural than “Whom is it for?” Perhaps this will become the case for “I/me” someday?
You make a number of interesting observations, and you’re right that “Who is it for” does feel more natural, despite being the object of that sentence.
Perhaps you’re correct that some teachers taught English grammar poorly, and insisted on specific words without explaining the underlying grammar, and perhaps that failure has led to people using the language incorrectly, which has then snowballed such errors into common usage.
Another word I often see poorly used is the reflexive pronoun ‘myself’, which should be used as the object when the subject and object of the sentence both refer to the person who is speaking, as in “I gave myself a pen”, but I know at least three people who commonly misuse it with a sentence like “Make a decision and get back to myself”, which is just hopelessly wrong and sounds terrible, but I think it may be the same issue you described where people have never had it explained to them what the correct usage is, and end up mistakenly thinking that it sounds more “correct” to say the word myself in place of the word me. Credit to Austin Power’s deliberate blunder Allow myself to introduce myself
Yeah, the “for x and I” is definitely a hypercorrection. But I don’t think the original “me and x” is the result of prescriptivism - I’m not sure what correction would cause it. It’s interesting because French has a very similar phenomenon with its emphatic pronouns (e.g. “Ma mère et moi, nous faisons…” “My mother and me, we do…”) In any case, it would be interesting to see how things develop over the next few hundred years
I suppose you’re the type of person who believes that once an error gets enough momentum it is no longer a error. I doubt that I’ll be able to change your mind, but I’ll give it shot anyway.
While I recognise that we no longer speak the English of Shakespeare, it’s a very different thing to suggest that when people make grammatical errors today, it’s just a part of the natural development of a language.
I would put it to you that English of today is actually changing more slowly than it has it past, because of better global education, better access to the same consistent sets of grammatical rules (it’s very easy to look things up on the internet today - that was not the case in London in 1600), and we have far more exposure to geographically distanced social interactions between people from all over the world through social media on a daily basis, than has ever existed before.
There are certainly variants and dialects where specific language structures differ from others, but it is simply wrong to claim that “me and my friend went shopping” is grammatically correct simply because it’s a common error. It’s not, it’s an error, in just the same way that mispelling their/they’re/there is wrong, and the way that using an apostrophe in possessive pronouns is wrong.
I lament the loss of adverbs in favour of adjectives, where someone might say “I will do that quick” (should be ‘quickly’), or the even more common one, “I did good” (should be ‘well’ - people do well, Mother Teresa did good). If we simply allow these errors because they’re deemed close enough to understand someone, then should we just throw out the rules, sit back, and watch the resulting confusion with glee? The reason we teach people grammar is precisely so that they can be precise, not just so that they can be understood. Being able to “just be understood” is no more than the most basic level of communication, and should not be the bar that one aims for in life.
I’m not prescribing that everyone needs to stick to one specific set of grammar rules, nor am I suggesting that they need to stick to all the rules of the dialect they speak, but I do suggest that there are commonly made errors which are obviously wrong, and which can be trivially corrected to improve communication. I’ve been hauled up on adding a space before a question mark, which I think is more of style thing than a grammar rule, and I’m not so worried about that sort of thing (some people are, I’m not). I’m not even that worried about the occasional or obvious typo, but I do get irritated by basic words being regularly mispelled or substituted for other similar sounding words, and I do get irritated when I see people not being able to get the sentence structure of subject/verb/object correct, as we saw here.
Whether you agree it or not, having a poor command of grammar does affect a person’s credibility, particularly in professional and legal roles, and it’s such so simple to put a bit of effort in to correct it, before it becomes a bad habit.
I suppose you’re the type of person who believes that once an error gets enough momentum it is no longer a error.
That is literally how language works. If you have any idea about historical linguistics, you would know this.
While I recognise that we no longer speak the English of Shakespeare, it’s a very different thing to suggest that when people make grammatical errors today, it’s just a part of the natural development of a language.
Do you have some proposal to make about how “natural development” occurs as opposed to errors that gain momentum that somehow we overlooked as linguists? Do you seriously think people were any less incensed by changes in pronunciations and grammar 1000 years ago than they are today? As someone who actually studied historical linguistics, I can tell you that there is no distinction between natural development and errors that gain momentum. Is there some kind of guiding force that makes it okay for palatalisation to occur in Old English but not for t-glottalisation to occur in Modern English? Or is it okay for the grammatical case system to “naturally” disappear everywhere except pronouns, in which case it’s a horrible modern error?
I think you’re right that language changes differently in some ways these days, in particular due to widespread literacy and enforcement of certain grammatical standards in schools. But the reason these standards have to be enforced is because they are often in opposition to what are actually already well-established grammatical rules in spoken language. To be clear, I’m in no way arguing that we shouldn’t teach formal grammar for writing and higher register use, but you need to understand that this doesn’t invalidate the very real grammar of other registers.
go back to your library, nerd
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lol, the rock would just move or something.
Me and the boys got a second set of chains wrapped around the stone and hooked up to Joe’s Toyota Tundra pulling in the opposite direction
