• Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    This is why some people insist on the generic he in English. A few hundred years ago, some British asshole who thought Latin was a perfect language decided to impose Latin rules on English, including such nonsense as “you can’t end a sentence with a preposition” and “never split infinitives”, as well as proscribing the then-common singular they in favor of “he”. The damage he did to the English language is still not fully repaired.

    • Gabe Bell@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      But not ending a sentence with a preposition lead to a surprising grammar joke in “Beavis and Butthead Do America” which was one of the highlights of my early twenties.

      It was really something magnificent to behold :)

        • Gabe Bell@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          Yeah – it kind of loses something when you retell it out of context, but I’ll give it a go :-

          Agent Bork: Chief, you know that guy whose camper they were whacking off in?

          Agent Fleming: Bork, you’re a Federal Agent. You represent the United States government. Never end a sentence with a preposition.

          See I am a huge grammar nerd, and I find grammar jokes, and dangling modifier jokes and so on, really funny.

          But given the general level of humour in “Beavis and Butthead” I wasn’t expecting this sort of joke, and it entirely caught me by surprise, and made me laugh for five minutes. I just thought it was far funnier and far better than most of the humour in the film.

          Yeah, okay. Maybe it’s just me.