Peeving

Pranav Mistry was one of the speakers at IIT Bombay’s Techfest this year. He rose to fame in 2010 for his TED Talk on Sixth Sense, a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with it (Description sourced from his website). Since then, he has been in and out of limelight, and has generally been on the receiving end of a lot of (well deserved) love and admiration from Indians, especially because he comes off as a ‘son of the soil’.

Word Rage is a common phenomenon that particularly affects the intellectual community, whose members apparently can’t convince themselves of their intellectuality unless they swear bodily harm against people who use words they don’t like or misplace apostrophes or other sundry stuff. It also serves as a classic ad-hominem tactic—if you can’t find any sensible counter-argument to someone’s claims, criticize his spelling or usage instead and pat your back for a job well done.

Someone called E has posted a question in the comments section of my last post—The VanDamme Academy, and why grammar is not about clarity—Part 2. I was going to answer it there itself, but I realized this had enough material to be a post, so here it goes. First, his question: So, what, according to you, is ‘unconditionally ungrammatical’ about _They is walking_? If it conveys all the information the speaker intends to convey, unambiguously, the only thing wrong with it is the fact that it does not follow convention (the convention of conjugating a verb a certain way with certain subjects)

[This is Part 2 of the post title. If you haven’t read the first part, please read it here, though this post can be read in isolation too] An important distinction that people often miss out on is the difference between _grammar_ and _style_—the difference between writing _correctly_ and writing well. And this distinction is very important because it’s more or less easy for most native speakers with some amount of training in the standard dialect (and knowledge of things like right spellings) to write correctly.

Miheer Desai suggested that I check out the Lisa VanDamme channel on YouTube for her views on parenting and teaching. I found the VanDamme Academy fairly interesting, and Ms VanDamme seems to be a very passionate person. Her video response to the Chinese Moms article was also thought-provoking, and it’s heartening to see that someone is putting an effort into improving pedagogy and understanding the ways in which we can educate kids in today’s world.