Grammar Nazi Quiz

[Gob]

BBC Quiz on Grammar

Embarrassingly, only 5/10 for me.

[Sue U]

10/10. (And I barely speak English.)

[Big RR]

9/10.

[dales]

0-3: Colon confusenik

My colon needs all the help it can get.



(actually I recieved a higher score, so there)

[Lord Jim]

Embarrassingly, only 5/10 for me.

Lucky for you it wasn't a "BBC Quiz On Recognizing Typos"....

Or the results might have been far more embarrassing...


9/10...

Life is too short to remember the difference between a "gerund" a "modal" and an "imperative"...

[Rick]

Caring about grammar is something I don't...

[Econoline]

10/10!

Achtung! Ve haf vays uf making you grammatical!



Nein, ve don't....ve haf vays uf ignoring your boo-boos...

[Crackpot]

5/10 surprised the hell out of me

[Sean]

8/10 but as a northerner I take issue with #9. The 'wrong' answer sounds perfectly reasonable to me...

[Daisy]

Another 8/10 here.

Must be the northern upbringing Sean

[MajGenl.Meade]

7/10 I know nothing of gerunds and "may or might" defeated me.

That one about the brother was stupid. "This is my sister who lives in Madrid and this is my brother Fred who doesn't and this is my sibling, Hilary"
It was not stated that the sentence structure was correct. With or without the comma, the narrator is saying that brother Fred does not live in Madrid. With or without the comma, it can never be assumed that sibling Hilary does live in Madrid and must be male.

Besides, Hilary's a girl's name and any male named Hilary should be disinherited and sent to live in Barcelona

Meade

[oldr_n_wsr]

I do grammar not.

[Andrew D]

I agree with MajGenl.Meade that the BBC is wrong on number 3.

"I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary." Which of the following is correct?

* * *

He's male. The absence of a comma before "who doesn't" implies that there are other brothers. A comma after "my brother" would mean that there was only one brother.

The sentence, ungrammatical as it is, plainly does not mean that "my brother who doesn't" is someone other than Benedict. To mean that, the sentence would have to read:

"I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, to my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary."

Parallelism requires "to A, to B, to C, and to D." The phrasing "to A, to B, C, and to D" is gibberish.

Besides violating parallelism, the sentence also bungles appositives. That matters, because the BBC's answer hinges on the lack of a comma after "my brother" -- a comma which would turn would turn "my brother" into an appositive separate from "who doesn't".

But "my brother who doesn't" is an appositive itself. See, e.g., the fourth example here: In the sentence "The insect, a large, hairy-legged cockroach that has spied my bowl of oatmeal, is crawling across the kitchen table," the entire emphasized phrase is an appositive. (Emphasis in original.)

As correctly stated in the linked article, "a nonessential appositive is always separated from the rest of the sentence with comma(s)." (Emphasis in original.) The phrase "my brother who doesn't" is separated from the rest of the sentence by commas, and there is no comma within that phrase. Therefore, that phrase must be an appositive referring to "Benedict," and it carries no implication at all that there are other brothers.

And it especially risible that the BBC's answer should depend on the punctuation of an appositive, because the BBC mispunctuates the first appositive in the sentence: The sentence should begin "I'd like to introduce you to my sister, Clara, who ...."

(For those of you who think that "my sister Clara" is correct: If that is so, then "my only other sibling Hilary" must also be correct. But despite having put no comma before "Clara" the BBC put a comma before "Hilary". The BBC cannot have it both ways.)

The BBC's having botched parallelism, misunderstood appositives, and misapplied the very pseudo-rule on which it erroneously relies dissuaded me from taking the rest of the quiz. I prefer to be tested on grammar by people who actually understand it.