Adverbs Cannot Be Plural

"Anyways" is not a word and I am striving to strike this colloquialism from my speech. "Anyway" is an adverb meaning "anyhow" or "in any case."

This attempt takes the same form as that of avoiding sentences ending with a preposition and correct usage of "who" and "whom." When I commit an error in speech or writing, I correct myself externally, highlighting the error to whomever I am conversing. After sufficient repetition of this behavior, I correct the error internally before I make it and, then, externally speak or write correctly.

Feel free to call me out on any grammatical or semantic errors in my writing on drewd.

4 Comments

  1. From laura

    Commented October 1st, 2007 2:20 pm

    Careful about trying to eliminate prepositions at the end of sentences, because English still has decedents of the German seperable prefix verbs (although in English they're seperable phrasal verbs). You can recognize them based on how they behave with nouns versus pronouns: "I handed in the paper" but "I handed it in". They apparently must list these verbs in ESL books, but unfortunately English teachers aren't taught ESL and so don't realize that the dangling preposition rule is artificial and would force awkward rewordings.

  2. From drew

    Commented October 2nd, 2007 11:33 am

    That is an excellent point, Laura. Thank you. I am having trouble finding any websites with a clear rule for this formation.

  3. From laura

    Commented October 3rd, 2007 8:20 pm

    I only know of the one way of telling - I just stopped worrying about it too much. I wouldn't know about them at all except that an old German teacher who also taught ESL mentioned it one time and an English major picked a huge, silly fight over it. Eventually the teacher brought in a textbook with a big list of seperable phrasal verbs to shut her up.

  4. From i Am a Nerd

    Commented August 11th, 2008 10:03 am

    [...] find grammar, punctuation, semantics, etc. to be quite interesting and tend to obsess over certain rules or peculiarities. In addition to my constant battle against incorrectly dangling [...]

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