Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

My only issue with this email is that he used the subject "we" when mentioning grabbing a coffee. The current accepted standard of phrasing in business circles eliminates the subject and would read "would love to grab a coffee".

Would love to hear your thoughts on this space.

View on HN

Would love to give, but 2 busy

Sent from my mobile device. Please excuse typos.

You forgot the one letter signature, so pressed for time.

Only capitalized due to auto-capitalization.

Lol

tl;dr

The L in Lol was capitalized due to the phone

Is that really an accepted standard? I have to go out on a limb here and ask if that's even a proper sentence? Who/what is the subject? It certainly helps to know who you would be having coffee with.

The subject is implied and purposely left out to avoid emphasis.

It's not an ultra-formal construction, but it would be a stretch to call it incorrect grammar.

You know who you'd be having coffee with. The sender of the email. :)

Just as much of a stretch to call it proper grammar, though ;-)

(Yes, that sentence was even less proper.)

It will always be a stretch, because there is no such thing as proper grammar.

The subject is an implied first person. (i.e., "I" or "we.")

I see this kind of omission as a way for cowards to avoid explicitly standing behind their request, both to diminish their own disappointment if the recipient says no or ignores them and to mitigate the chance that the recipient perceives their note as 'needy.'

Just my 2¢.

I was wondering about this construct several times in the past.

AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.

My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?

Spanish is pro-drop and much more present in the US.

the more spanish i speak the more i want to drop english words, and the more confortable i am moving the subject of the adjective to the end of the sentence.

"Pro-drop" languages usually incorporate the person in the verb. So "grab" in "we grab" is different than "I grab". In Greek, it's "πίνουμε" vs "πίνω". You omit the subject because you lose no information. In fact, it's redundant to include it, so you only do it if you want to emphasize it.

Right, technically English doesn't let you drop pronouns. On the other hand there is a pretty long tradition of dropping first person pronouns in writing. You see it in informal correspondence and journals from before electronic media were omnipresent. Stuff like, "Went to the store today. Got stuck in a snow bank and had to call a tow truck."

I don't think it comes from immigrants that speak other languages, so much as economizing long passages of text that's all in the first person. The "I" at the beginning of every sentence just gets dropped.

It depends on whether you think "ungrammatical" means "not approved of by prescriptivists", or you mean "not used and/or not understood by fluent speakers".

Given that you know the word "pro-drop", I assume you know this, and I'm not sure if I should bother continuing in this vein. Maybe you're asking for a descriptive grammaticality judgement from fluent English speakers?

I agree that from a prescriptivist perspective, this is improper formal writing.

From a descriptivist perspective, I try to avoid biz guys, but I suspect the GP post nailed it, with respect to common usage in the appropriate sociolect (the same sociolect that has "proof points", "value-add", "circling back", etc). Although maybe not for the last sentence of an email that already had that much circumlocution.

Ungrammaticality changes over time. For a new grad emailing her boss, douchy pro-dropping in English is ungrammatical. Eventually, it sinks in as an acquired taste, and becomes grammatical.

Hey, is it ungrammatical to call a woman Douchy?

I think we (American English speakers) tend to drop pronouns in informal writing more than in speech. At least, thinking about how I'd say things, I might elide the pronoun almoooost to the point of dropping it, but it still "feels" like it's there, even if it didn't come out very much.

But "was thinking the other day, why don't we..." sounds fine to me in an email. wouldn't say it out loud, though...

> AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.

Not exactly. English is indeed considered not pro-drop, but that doesn't mean that dropping a pronoun is always ungrammatical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language#English

My son is learning to speak at the moment but can only use 'me' and 'them' as pronouns.

So everything is 'me going to have drink' or 'them going to the park'.

Right now I am in a constant pattern of repeating every sentence swapping 'me' for 'I' or 'them' for 'they'.

Then..this morning.. 'I ate my cereal without spilling anything Daddy!'. It's the little victories that make you smile.

Nailed it. It's a way to extend an invitation with minimal vulnerability.

I wouldn't agree that it's necessarily "for cowards," probably because I tend to employ similar strategies.

When I recognize it in communication from someone else, I understand where that person is coming from and consider the message delivered. It's kind of a fun game, striking that balance between nonchalance and making your intentions clear.

Interesting. I always thought this form of writing was to cut down on the number of words in an email, so that the reader can more easily skim for the overall message, while also reducing formality and increasing familiarity. I've even recently tried to start emulating this style for those reasons.

If you said text messaging then I would agree. That's the first thing that came to mind because traditionally everyone wants to save characters when texting resulting in ur, b, etc.

Actually, with texting, I find it harder to shorten words into misspellings like ur or b, because I end up fighting against my phone's autocorrect. Sure, once you use it a few times, your phone will learn to stop autocorrecting, but why bother? I don't understand why people still use "ur" when "your" is just as easy to type these days. SMS length isn't really an issue anymore either, with most smartphones automatically concatenating longer messages for the recipient.

That is true, with smartphones this has changed (or should have go away). The issue isn't really about concatenating--I had nokia phones with just a keypad that did that years ago--it's the fact that often you can keep a message short and only use 1 message with the shorter "words". This won't make a difference if you have an unlimited text plan but it still matters for some people.

THANK you. I've said this for so long and I'm always scoffed at.

It's not grammatical English, but nor are a variety of other constructs that we see as normal, such as "ain't no," or even "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun (this one matters only to sticklers). Convenience need not obey the rules. Would love to expand further if you are interested.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuati...

The rules describe how people speak in large numbers. So these examples are grammatical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com