Is grammar really necessary? You know this might be the kind of video you’d want to send to your teacher. Rudolph Gresham, one of the most famous grammarians in American history, answered that question in a pretty interesting way. He said “a large part of your life spent in learning English grammar and usage. What did you get out of it? How often do you use your precious knowledge of the moods, and tenses, participles, and gerunds, demonstrous pronouns, and subordinations, conjunctions?” The obvious answer is NEVER!
You speak, and read, and write all day long, but throughout your adult life, you haven’t spent a single second, deciding whether to put a verb in front of noun and indicative or subjective or in exercising a choice between a definite and indefinite article. Grammar is something you learn, promptly forget and dismiss for the rest of your life.
Let me tell you there is a little book, called the “Teacher’s Grammar Book”. They showed the studies since 1930’s demonstrate every single time that students who studied grammar more write worse. In other words, if you just spent time writing, listening to what you’re saying, saying if your friends think it sounds pretty good, you will find out your grammar will improve. Not by knowing a bunch of rules, but by usinga little common sense and LISTENING…. to how it sound….!
영어 문법이란것이 이렇듯 미국인들에게 조차도 환영 받지 못하는 영역입니다. 그러나, 아무리 듣기 좋은 말이라 하더라도, 문법 혹은 규칙에 현저히 어긋나는 말은 뜻이제대로 전달 되지 못하는 것입니다. 아래에 있는 비디오를 보시면 문법 자체가 얼마나 소모적일수 있는지 아실수 있습니다... 물론 픽션이긴 합니다만...
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Whomever or Whoever
Whomever Is Never Actually Right
Posted by Neal on October 21, 2007
(출처: http://tinyurl.com/whoever-whomever)
Ryan: What I really want, honestly Michael, is for you to know it, so that you cancommunicate it to the people here, to your clients, to whomever.
Michael: [chuckle] OK.
Ryan: What?
Michael: It’s whoever,not whomever.
Ryan: No, it’s whomever.
Michael: No, whomever is never actually right.
Jim: Sometimes it’s right.
Creed: Michael is right; it’s a made-up word used to trick students.
Andy: No. Actually, whomever is the formal version of the word.
Oscar: Obviously, it’s a real word, but I don’t know when to use itcorrectly.
Michael: [aside] Not a native speaker.
Kevin: I know what’s right, but I’m not gonna say, because you’re alljerks who didn’t come see my band last night.
Ryan: Do you really know which one is correct?
Kevin: I don’t know.
Pam: It’s whom when it’s the object of a sentence,and who when it’s the subject.
Phyllis: That sounds right.
Michael: Well it sounds right but is it?
Ryan: As an object.
Kelly: Ryan used me as an object.
Angela(?): How did he use it again?
Toby: It was, “I wanted Michael” — subject — “to explain the computersystem” — the object –
Michael: Thank you!
Toby: — “to whomever,” meaning us, the indirect object, which is thecorrect usage of the word.
Michael: No one asked you anything ever, so why don’t whomever’s name isToby, take a letter opener and stick it in your skull.
Ryan: Hey, this doesn’t matter and I don’t even care.
The fact that such a discussion can realistically take place isan indicator of the moribund status of whom (nicely summed up by Geoff Pullum here). In the dialogue we get just aboutevery view of the word: rejection of it as a hypercorrection (Michael, Creed);acceptance but with admitted ignorance of how to use it (Oscar, Kevin); astatement of what’s becoming the new, sociolinguistically rather thansyntactically based rule for usage (Andy); and the fairly accurate statement ofthe Standard English rule regarding whom (Pam, Toby).
Toby, however, overlooks that in I want Michael to explain…,it’s not obvious that Michael is a subject. I is the subject of want, and Michael is its direct object, as evidenced bythe fact that it can be replaced be him,but not he. On the otherhand, Michael seems to be the subject ofexplain in some sense, as he’s the one whowill do the explaining. A lot of syntactic theorizing has taken as its startingpoint facts like this one, arguing whether Michael is a direct object, or a subject thathas been “raised” to become a direct object, or perhaps something else. Evenso, Toby’s and Pam’s statements are remarkably accurate, in light of irritatinglycommon errors like calling Hedied a sentence in the“passive tense”, or saying that science is a verb. (Props to Oscar, too,for distinguishing dislike of a word from nonexistence of a word.)
Despite its accuracy, Pam’s rule doesn’t really address theproblem of whomever. Itcovers whom just fine, butthe trouble is that when you’re dealing with who(m)ever,you’re usually dealing with more than one clause. Let’s look at a simpleexample first: GO TO HERE (http://tinyurl.com/whoever-whomever)for more example…. At this point I don’teven care, either….
결국, 시험문제에서 whomever와whoever를 골라야만 한다면…. 그냥 아무생각 없이 찍고, 결과를 받아 들이는 것이지요. 이런 문제를 출제한 사람을 원망하면서….