Grammatical Misunderstanding's ;)
Do you have extreme attention to detail in your everyday life?
- Yes, I think I do, although I'm not sure what constitutes "extreme". I generally tend to focus on details rather than the full picture and I notice patterns in things that other people don't.
Are you artistic or math/science driven? Is that even a valid distinction?
- I am both artistic and science driven. I am not maths driven.
Are you extremely logical?
- Yes.
Are you aggressive? Passive? Emotionless?
- I'm not aggressive, I am rather passive and I am emotionless on the outside, but by no means emotionless on the inside.
How many languages can you speak well enough to be understood?
- One, just English. Although even when I speak English I rarely manage to make myself understood anyway, my verbal vocabulary is leagues below my written vocabulary and there seems to be a fault in the path between my brain and my mouth.
Do you have a near-perfect or great memory?
- No, my memory is rather poor, by my standards.
Do you have a higher than normal IQ?
- I've never been officially tested, but I am certain my IQ is higher than average, even if only by a small degree.
Ambivalence
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This is an interesting enough piece of self-reflection, but I shall inflict it on the rest of you out of pure malice.
Do you have extreme attention to detail in your everyday life?
Yes, for anything I concentrate on. No, for most things, although I do habitually end up tracing patterns in the wallpaper (etc.).
Are you artistic or math/science driven? Is that even a valid distinction?
I think you need more choices! I'm correlation driven. I love finding links between things. I love history, maps, etymology and music.
Are you extremely logical?
No. I'm intuitive about things, and I can make some leaps very fast and well, so that I am usually correct, but I am and have always been poor at pure logic.
Are you aggressive? Passive? Emotionless?
Labile, erratic, never emotionless.
How many languages can you speak well enough to be understood?
Two.
Do you have a near-perfect or great memory?
No. Although I know - in general estimation - a lot about a lot, I know very few things in perfect detail. I very often find myself singing nine verses and getting the tenth slightly wrong (literally and figuratively; I sing a lot, but that applies to everything else.) I have most of a certain Vampire Weekend song stuck in my head right now, no prizes for guessing which.
Do you have a higher than normal IQ?
No. Maybe. I'm clever and tolerably well-qualified, but it's not something that IQ tests seem to measure, or at least, I do not readily understand number puzzles and rotating shapes and all that sort of rubbish.
What is it that separates us from the pack and makes us something of a 'grammatical subset' of the majority of WP posters? Why do we care so much about it and others here don't?
When something is written according to more formal rules of spelling and/or grammar, more information can be carried in the sentence; in some cases, more precise information than would be carried in the sentence if spoken (for instance, suppose you hear someone saying "there to" - or could it be "they're too" or "their two"; the spoken differences are minimal and you must rely on context). General use of formally incorrect language denies us the opportunity to use that capacity, and also denies us the opportunity to deliberately break the rules for fun (as the OP did with the thread title).
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all the 'smilies' look the same to me. sorry, but reading emotion on someone's face is baffling to me, even hovering my mouse over the smilie to see what emotion/meaning, etc. doesn't enlighten me much, either. Just one of those Aspie things, I guess.
(...you ended your post with one of those baffling smilies. Why?)
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Music Theory 101: Cadences.
Authentic cadence: V-I
Plagal cadence: IV-I
Deceptive cadence: V- ANYTHING BUT I ! !! !
Beethoven cadence: V-I-V-I-V-V-V-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I
-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I! I! I! I I I
fiddlerpianist
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I'm generally pretty forgiving of people's grammar here on WP, simply because it's not many people's strong suit.
I'm mildly irritated by bad grammar I run across during my day (such as "Fish Fry on Friday's"). If I am reading something on the web (or in print) that is attempting to be credible but has grammatical errors, I immediately do not take the author seriously.
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"That leap of logic should have broken his legs." - Janissy
all the 'smilies' look the same to me. sorry, but reading emotion on someone's face is baffling to me, even hovering my mouse over the smilie to see what emotion/meaning, etc. doesn't enlighten me much, either. Just one of those Aspie things, I guess.
(...you ended your post with one of those baffling smilies. Why?)
I personally think smileys like this:
So far (this just being based on two answers and my own experiences) we trend towards attention to detail, but enough others of the main group seem to have this to preclude it from being a commonality among our subset.
I was shocked, truly shocked, to see this was NOT memory related. I expected to see answerers with phenomenal memories (how else can you keep all the spellings and grammar rules in your head)! Maybe your memory is better than you give yourself credit for or maybe it is exception within a given arena?
It's not drive or logic driven (I appreciate you going outside the question here and adding correlation, Ambivalence; don't feel constrained).
IQ (percieved or tested) also seems to have no bearing.
Ambivalence's closing comments bring up something I had completely overlooked -- in essence the echo of a relationship to the trend towards Social Justice. Perhaps it is because we can't stand it when people BREAK THE RULES! Even those of spelling & grammar? Maybe our sense of Social Justice is higher than most? Mine sure is.
I also notice I didn't answer this myself...
Do you have extreme attention to detail in your everyday life?
Yup, guilty.
Are you artistic or math/science driven? Is that even a valid distinction?
I'm driven by what interests me at the time. This could be from any category. Who thought up this lousy question?
Are you extremely logical?
Yes. In fact, I have taught classes on Logic at our local Community College, PCC
Are you aggressive? Passive? Emotionless?
Passive-aggressive. Also, emotionless about things others are emotional about and vice-versa.
How many languages can you speak well enough to be understood?
English, French, Japanese, Spanish in that order of mastery
Do you have a near-perfect or great memory?
Younger -- Eidetic
Older -- Near perfect if concentrating (takes energy) or if extremely interested in topic. Gaps have started appearing as I age. I like these gaps; memory has been a curse to me.
Do you have a higher than normal IQ?
I don't believe my own tests. Having been tested a lot, I know how these tests work. According to the tests, I'm in the top percentiles; however I feel this is STRONGLY influenced by memory and pattern-recognition capabilities allowing me to regurgitate answers based on past tests (as well as formulate answers based on similarities to past tests).
Do you have a strong sense of Social Justice?
TOO strong. It's overwhelming and I fume about those who break the rules for hours, sometimes days. It is perhaps this, coupled with the fact that I studied English rules (published author - magazine articles only, no books), that makes these mistakes stick in my craw.
DISCLAIMER: All fragments intentional and/or for effect. Void where prohibited.
Perhaps I have a selective memory. I don't remember things that that are socially related (like if someone tells me to bring something in the next day or when their birthday is), I have an incredibly short term memory when it comes to such things. I also don't have a good memory for shapes or numbers, even though I notice patterns in such things readily.
However, I have always been top of the class at spelling and very advanced in reading skills. Perhaps this is what my brain deems important? I rarely have trouble remembering spellings and most come to me like an extra sense.
I also don't have a particularly good long term memory. In fact, I'm sure both my long term and short term memory are well below average for my age, yet I can remember some tiny details for years that others don't recall after a few days.
Perhaps socially-learned facts are classed as trivial and given no priority when it comes to my memory space?
Or maybe because I tend to focus on details rather than general concepts, I tend to just remember details like spellings, rather than long passages of text.
Or perhaps I'm just the exception that proves the rule.
Oh my, I love this thread!
I have the hardest time texting people but sometimes I have to. I have a hard time making myself abbreviate words and use virtually no punctuation, but I have to do it in order to finish the message quickly. It really messes with my head to have to do that.
Another thing that really gets me is when people use restaurant and store names improperly. This one has always irked me and my wife rolls her eyes when I correct people but I feel that SOMEONE has to set people straight. I mean, COME ON!! An example of this would be the grocery store chain Kroger. Some of you will probably know of this chain while others may not, but it's a large US grocery store chain. The name, as printed on the signs and marketing materials, is "KROGER". What irks me is that most people will say, for example, "I'm on my way to Kroger's." It sends chills up and down my spine and it happens all the time. People really annoy me with that. We have a local restaurant named "Ristorante Giuseppe". People, my wife included, always call it "Giuseppe's" and it really gets under my skin. I hear this particular name a lot because my wife and I know the architects who designed it and they have a lot of functions there.
When I send a text, which admittedly isn't very often, I always use correct punctuation, spelling and grammar and don't abbreviate my words. This is partly because it feels wrong to do so, but also because I don't really understand text speak. I don't get which words you're supposed to abbreviate and by how much, so I just don't bother. It would probably take me longer to send a text in text speak because I would have to think about how to write each word.
When I was beginning to learn English at school, I once should translate something that became: "It's not my bike, it's my brother's". The teacher asked me how I spelled "brother's", and I just answered "B-R-O-T-H-E-R-S" (without mentioning the apostrophe). She wrote it on the blackboard and told me that "something" was missing; without the apostrophe it would be "brothers" as in: more than one brother...
We had some fun with that: "It's not my bike, it's my brothers"... hmmm you must have some very strange-looking brothers if they can be mistaken for a bike!
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