A Nasty Case of the Nominative
I mentioned Sam Williams' Free As In Freedom a while back. It's a book about Richard Stallman, the patriarch and prophet of free software, arch-hacker and author of GNU Emacs, computer genius and prickly conscience for many in the strange and wonderful world he inhabits.
It's an interesting book, partly because in accordance with RMS's own principles it is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). This means that everyone is assured the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially; and at the same time the author gets credit for his work, while not being considered responsible for any modifications. While you can buy a hard copy of the book, published by those excellent publishers O'Reilly, you can also get it free online at the author's web site. This version is capable of being modified, kept up to date, corrected, and thus co-authored by anyone who wants to add their own thoughts or reminiscences of RMS.
I shelled out about £16 for my hardcover hard copy, for the simple reason that I am, I confess, a bit of a book-sniffer. I love to hold a book, look at it, caress it, feel it, smell it. It's nice to be able to access content and read it on the Web (though not yet as easy to read as in hard print) but for sensual pleasure, it doesn't come close to a real book. I don't mind paying for this pleasure. But what I do mind, is the shoddy editing of this particular volume. There are spelling errors, even! in an age of ubiquitous and not always useful (or used) spell-checkers. There are mistakes in grammar. There are various other infelicities which pain has erased from my memory. And for some reason, where I wouldn't object so much to these in a 'free' Web-based edition, it makes me angry in one I have paid for.
This morning I choked on my toast over "Tracy invited Henning and I to go out for drinks", and spent several minutes shouting at the book, "No, listen to I! Don't take any notice of he! Him is just ignorant! 'Anyone and I' is only correct if it is the subject of the sentence, otherwise it has to be 'Anyone and me'. You wouldn't talk as me is doing unless you was a Mummerzetshire yokel, dammit." The book sat in stolid, unbending silence while my toast grew cold and my rage cooled with it.
With few enough grammatical cases in the English language, it does seem strange how often this particular one trips people up. I blame the lack of a classical education. But the good news (I'm pleased to say) is that rather than blaming the author I think I can probably blame a half-awake editor at O'Reilly. For the Web version, correctly, has "Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks". (In the interests of complete disclosure, I should also tell you that Sam later proposed to and married Tracy, so it was an invitation well made.)
Speaking of cases like this brings back a childhood memory of North London, then still semi-rural, perhaps, in which there were interesting case-formations still in common oral usage. Friends of mine really used to say: "This is mine. That one's yourn. This is ourn. And those are hisun and hern." Teachers used to treat these as cloddish, but I suspect their users were actually the true traditionalists, speaking English as it was spoken generations back.
It's an interesting book, partly because in accordance with RMS's own principles it is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). This means that everyone is assured the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially; and at the same time the author gets credit for his work, while not being considered responsible for any modifications. While you can buy a hard copy of the book, published by those excellent publishers O'Reilly, you can also get it free online at the author's web site. This version is capable of being modified, kept up to date, corrected, and thus co-authored by anyone who wants to add their own thoughts or reminiscences of RMS.
I shelled out about £16 for my hardcover hard copy, for the simple reason that I am, I confess, a bit of a book-sniffer. I love to hold a book, look at it, caress it, feel it, smell it. It's nice to be able to access content and read it on the Web (though not yet as easy to read as in hard print) but for sensual pleasure, it doesn't come close to a real book. I don't mind paying for this pleasure. But what I do mind, is the shoddy editing of this particular volume. There are spelling errors, even! in an age of ubiquitous and not always useful (or used) spell-checkers. There are mistakes in grammar. There are various other infelicities which pain has erased from my memory. And for some reason, where I wouldn't object so much to these in a 'free' Web-based edition, it makes me angry in one I have paid for.
This morning I choked on my toast over "Tracy invited Henning and I to go out for drinks", and spent several minutes shouting at the book, "No, listen to I! Don't take any notice of he! Him is just ignorant! 'Anyone and I' is only correct if it is the subject of the sentence, otherwise it has to be 'Anyone and me'. You wouldn't talk as me is doing unless you was a Mummerzetshire yokel, dammit." The book sat in stolid, unbending silence while my toast grew cold and my rage cooled with it.
With few enough grammatical cases in the English language, it does seem strange how often this particular one trips people up. I blame the lack of a classical education. But the good news (I'm pleased to say) is that rather than blaming the author I think I can probably blame a half-awake editor at O'Reilly. For the Web version, correctly, has "Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks". (In the interests of complete disclosure, I should also tell you that Sam later proposed to and married Tracy, so it was an invitation well made.)
Speaking of cases like this brings back a childhood memory of North London, then still semi-rural, perhaps, in which there were interesting case-formations still in common oral usage. Friends of mine really used to say: "This is mine. That one's yourn. This is ourn. And those are hisun and hern." Teachers used to treat these as cloddish, but I suspect their users were actually the true traditionalists, speaking English as it was spoken generations back.
posted by Tony at 11/06/2004 11:46:00 am
2 Comments:
What do you mean? Haven't you ever used Emacs? A whole environment that you never have to leave! Yes of course it has built in spell checking. Though I prefer vi at the moment (which doesn't - you have to use ispell or something, which I haven't got), and haven't made much headway with getting Emacs to work on the iBook.
This reminds me of a teenage summer spent with my Godmother in Denmark. Her older son was about 5 I suppose, and becoming happily bi-lingual, but had one particular foible. He would always announce "That are mine..." producing the pavlovian response "No Tom...that IS mine"..."But Kathryn, it's not...that are MINE!" which could be translated as "Stuff the grammar, you're not getting away with my lego" :-)
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