A NEW grammar nazi peeve discovered!1 Using the "$" plus number and adding "dollars" - Bleah!1
This has been popping at me more in the last few weeks: The news items or whatever (Is "or whatever" annoying, too?) use the symbol and number amounts, then add the word "dollars". As in: $15 million DOLLARS.
There's almost a musical caesura after the "$15 million" before the afterthought "DOLLARS" somehow has to be piled in. As if there were some hole that needed plugging. I think that the rise of text over vocalizing is at work: Like we want to hear "15 million DOLLARS," and while we silently read "$15 million" we don't hear the "$" as "DOLLARS".
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that at my age I'm able to participate *somewhat* under all the new non-rules!1
As for "grammar," when I was in grad school (early '70s), I took a grammar course thinking I was going to get to the bottom of it all. Well, this was the beginning of the different ballgame phenom: It wasn't about the old style grammar in the slightest. We were told that that was "Prescriptive" grammar, as in "prescribing" right vs wrong usages, that that was so passé, that where the game was Now (= "then"
was for "DEscriptive" grammar, wherein we were to take a piece of text from the way people actually talked and deconstruct it for the "Deep Meaning Structure".
Now/today we're told that the old Prescriptive grammar has been really wrong all along (O.K. to end with preposition; O.K. to split prepositions infinitives) because it was based on Latin rules, whereas English is not Latinate, blah blah, fine.
But then, back in the '70s we were also told that we needed to bury the pyramids and learn New Cool stuff. So turn on cable and it's hours of The Pyramids!1 As for New Cool stuff, it's all jumping and sliding and caterwauling and twirling. The Engineering Department majors were always complaining about how people like them would never make the cash that entertainment and sports people make by blowing their noses.
