No. Look up the definition of a sentence. Look at any grammar book. A sentence must have a subject and a predicate.True, the subject can be implied. But then the sentence isn't really "sit". It's "you sit".
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Strange Facts!
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The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.)If I recall correctly the plane had no name but a registration number. The song touches the topic of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly but in general it's about the loss of innocence in America such as the J.F.K. assassination etc. going around at that time.The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.Urban legend, it's true in other countries but not in the U.S.It's rumored that sucking on a copper penny will cause a breathalyzer to read 0.Not true, they did this on Mythbusters.
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My grammar book says, "The schoolroom rule that 'every sentence must have a full verb, and stand on its own as a complete utterance' is perhaps a good rule for schoolroom writing. But not for all writing." Fowler (first edition 1926, second edition 1965) gives ten different definitions of "sentence", says they are irreconcilable, and has an article on "verbless sentences". Modern grammarians don't try to create artificial rules and then make the language fit the rules: they observe how the language is actually used and draw conclusions from that. Unfortunately, though this has been the standard method of grammatical research for half a century or more, school grammar books keep repeating assorted mythical rules that have never existed in real life: you can't start a sentence with "and" or "but" or "however", you can't split an infinitive, you can't use an adjectival phrase attributively, you can't end a sentence with a preposition, you can only use the 's genitive of persons. Fowler uses the term "superstitions" for rules like these.Even the most anal-retentive grammarian, however, will accept "Go" as a full and complete sentence.
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Sounds like your "modern grammarians" are letting the monkeys run the zoo. The whole idea of bending the rules of proper usage to the dictates of common usage...that is basically pandering to the lowest common denominator.So within the next 5 years or so we can expect it to become "grammatically correct" to say "Those girls flirted with Adam and I."Sad...so sad...Sorry, I'm a purist. Maybe even a snob.
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SNOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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MICK!!!!!!!!!!!
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Mick? What you on about boy?
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Who you calling boy, you rude, selfish, sexy prick.Why I had hair on my fag before you were a itch in your daddy's mick britches.
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you cant forget his great ass
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In reply to:The whole idea of bending the rules of proper usage to the dictates of common usage...The question is, what do you mean by "proper"? How is it to be defined, to be determined? I think it goes back to one's philosophy of authority. "Authority" originally referred to authorship, and meant that if it was in a book, it must be right. It's nonsense when you think about it, but I'm afraid a lot of schoolroom grammar is based on nothing more.In the eighteenth century a fashion arose of imposing Latin rules on English. The ban on the split infinitive and on ending a sentence with a preposition both derive from this fashion. These are things you can't do in Latin (because they are impossible), so it was reasoned that you shouldn't do them in English. The fact that you can find split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences in good educated writers of every century didn't matter to these grammarians - they thought they were introducing an "improvement". We as users of the language are free to decide, if we wish, that it would be an improvement to reject their improvement and go back to the freedom Shakespeare had.Modern grammar is not a free-for-all. Grammarians observe what is practiced by speakers of the language; they also observe what is rejected. They may distinguish between educated and uneducated patterns. Few people would consider "those girls flirted with Adam and I" to be acceptable; but what about "it's me"? It doesn't fit Latin grammar, but "it's I" now sounds impossibly pretentious (and cf French "c'est moi"). Do you say "Adam is better-looking than me" or "Adam is better-looking than I"? The old grammarians insist on the second, despite Milton's "Satan, than whom none higher sat" (a line from Paradise Lost).Language changes and evolves, and we need to move with it or we get left behind. You don't get well understood if you speak Anglo-Saxon.
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What does that have to do with Bob's ass?
Just kidding...
Good information. I understand how even proper usage evolves over time. I guess my concern is that it doesn't evolve based on lazy people who just don't talk good. But your post adressed that.For years I tried to not end a sentence with a preposition. It's easy to do when writing, but when speaking, it just sounds silly, and a bit pretentious.
As for your examples, if I were writing, I would probably say "Adam is better looking than I am." But when speaking I would definitely say "Adam is better looking than me." Which begs the question, why do I have such major problems with "Those girls flirted with Adam and I"? It's breaking the same rule.
I think, and I hate to admit this, that it has to do with who is doing it. My perception is that the rampant misuse of the pronoun I is typically commited by young folks (teenagers, college students, 20-somethings) who are trying to sound like they are all educated, using proper grammar and whatnot, but never put forth the effort to learn proper grammar. So they think it makes them sound educated to say "Those girls flirted wtih Adam and I", because they never learned the rules of pronoun usage.
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I shave my fag, I do not like hair on the shaft, it covers length and makes it look smaller.on a more posative note, I like the post it note bob added to his banned sign it looks so much more official now
