grammar is relationships
This is not a post about American versus British English. I hope you’ll indulge me. It's come out of some Twitter conversations this afternoon. It started when I read this sentence in James Pennebaker’s book The Secret Life of Pronouns : Function words require social skills to use properly. And I wondered how it had got(ten) past a copyeditor. So I did a Twitter poll to see if other people were happy with the sentence. The poll looked like this: "Function words require social skills to use properly" Is this sentence: — Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) August 9, 2019 So, 25% of more than 300 people thought it sounded fine. 75% felt there was something weird about it. Given how I phrased the question, it's possible that the 75% had 100 different reasons for thinking it weird. But considering some of the tweet-replies I had, I know that at least some people had the same reaction that I did. The problem with the sentence for me is that there is no reasonable subject for ...