I {heart} word nerds

[sarahmichigan]

On the plus side, I love that I work with a bunch of word nerds. Last week, a few of us got into a big debate about whether the word "none" is singular or plural. Would you say, "None of the customers were recognized as regulars?" or "None of the customers was recognized as a regular?" *

Even many of my friends who don't have English backgrounds have expansive vocabularies, and I love not having to dumb down the words I choose so as not to make someone feel inferior (unlike in high school when I was accused of using big words because I was trying to show off). I recently used "importune" in conversation and then kind of smirked at myself. Word nerd, indeed.

(yeah, so I'm chatty today. It's slooooooooow at work.)

*Most guides to grammar and style say either is acceptable. You can consider "none" to be short for "not one" or for "not any."

Comments

[flyinglemurs.livejournal.com]

The first one sounds better to me.
My journal is not actually a good example of my writing or grammer as its usually stream of thought then hit send...but I used to write up training were I used to work and tons of memos and instructional stuff. I never thought my grammer was all that good until I saw some of the memos my coworkers would write....all people w degrees...some were just horrible. Bad flow, bad word form agreement, ick.

I have some trouble with knowing more words inside my head then I use in conversation because well I hardly ever hear them and so don't know how to pronounce them correctly! Probably a sign of growing up in a non-big-word-using family while reading too many books.

Oh and I also like word puzzles. Call me geek. Not word searches though those are dull.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I love word games, too. I put "variety word puzzles" on my Xmas wishlist every year, and I have a ton of puzzle books that are about 3/4 full because I do all the puzzles except the word searches and number puzzles.

I know what you mean about having access to a lot of words but being afraid to use them because you're not sure how to pronounce them. My hubby, dionysus1999 is the same way.

[flyinglemurs.livejournal.com]

Drat, I posted something and the wireless ate it..

Yeah I like the variety ones best. Crosswords are okay but I like the weird ones, and things like quotefalls and ...hmm, the one where you fill in a bunch of words above numbered blanks and then use those to make a quote.

My dad and I have this cool father daughter bonding thing going now I think...he's been saving his half finished cross word puzzles for me to finish when he gets stuck. It works out well because the ones he can't get are usually the ones I can, and ones I wouldn't have been able to get he did already.

Yeah...on the 2nd one..and nothing makes you sound worse than using realllly big words, and pronouncing them incorrectly ugh. So I just avoid them if I don't know how you say them usually. But I do pretty good on word trivia quizes, or the reader's digest vocab thingy.