queerlilhayseedIs it rude to interrogate downvoters?
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/casualconversation/p/691319/is-it-rude-to-interrogate-downvoters
corsicanguppyI down-vote bad writing and spelling, sometimes. Comma splice is a huge one, but “emails” and “literally” can get a knee-jerk down-vote as well.
“emails” as opposed to “e-mails”? That’s a new one to me, I’ve always assumed both are valid.
Both are equally valid, which is to say incorrect. Mass nouns get no S. You’d just as soon write “I got 3 mails from the mailbox” and wonder why you weren’t taken seriously.
Lvxferre [he/him]Mass nouns get no S
More accurately, a mass noun cannot be assigned a grammatical number. For example, compare
Asterisk means “agrammatical”. #1 shows “bread” is a mass noun, and #2 shows “sheep” isn’t, even if “sheep” doesn’t accept the ⟨s⟩. (It’s just a weird plural.)
…that said I think your take is bad. “Countability” is rather unstable, specially if there’s some semantic pressure to keep both the countable and uncountable meanings. That applies to “mail”; in fact the word used to be only countable. (It meant “bag”. Nowadays that meaning is archaic, but still.) Add dialectal variation (e.g. Indian English speakers seem to be rather fond of using “mail” as a countable noun) and language interference, and the whole thing becomes an “I only accept when people use a language the same way as I do!”.
Punctuation is the text equivalent of prosody, the comma splice is not some “error” to be “fought against”, unlike what all those toilet paper manual styles literally screech against, they’re like those junk emails we get, comma splice is the equivalent of speaking fast and relatively uninterrupted, like I’m doing here, it’s a self-demonstrating example anyway, you probably get it, right.
…serious now. What you say in a discursive level IMO matters way, way more than how you say it.
The medium, apparently, is the message.
But I do love the oppositional/defiant “screeching” comment.
Nah. The medium interacts with the message, shapes it, but it is not the message itself.