nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Child Item

Shocking stupidity

tech77

This follows on a bit from the -5, -6 thread below.

I was just watching "Are you smarter than a ten year old" on sky one with Noel Edmonds.

A contestant, a grown woman was asked what was the verb in this sentence "The man worked really hard" and she couldn't answer it.

I was literally shocked that
1) an adult could be that stupid
2) that that adult would then appear on national tv exposing this stupidity.

I'm constantly amazed by depths of ignorance/stupidity and yet these people it would seem function perfectly normally in society.

I'm thinking to myself maybe dumb IS the new world order and the way to go.

Incidentally that show is annoying in so many ways I don't know where to start...

Find more posts tagged with

Quick Links

Comments

skywalker

Im graduating with a masters degree in 2 days, & without a quick google Id be taking a guess with that question. Does that make me stupid?

Maybe it does and our educational system has just allowed me to breeze through all these years. Or maybe knowing what a verb is really isnt that important to most people (unless you want to use your knowledge of verbs to look down your nose at people that is).

Use your verbal powers for good people.

tech77

pickarooney wrote: »

I was shocked to see you confuse an adjective with a verb in the above sentence.

Haha.
Spelling error no more.

I could easily dismiss that as a typo but i'll be honest and i won't.

A genuine spelling error does not constitute grammatical confusion as you know yourself.

In other words when using the phrase "i am loath" i am obviously aware loath is adjectival (meaning unwilling, reluctant etc) but i spelled it incorrectly that is all.
I am obviously equally aware that "I loathe" is the verb.

As i say spelling error, not grammatical confusion.

jimbo78 wrote: »

Almost anyone could read three books in a week, surely thats not a measure of intelligence.
An intelligent person would be able to remember basic facts

This reminds me of Finchy equating book-reading with intelligence in the Pub Quiz episode of The Office- "i read a book a week".

I love it.

tech77

nipplenuts wrote: »

Apart from that, wtf would you, a smart person, watch it?

Flicking thru' and thought (foolishly) it might be worth watching.
5 minutes of my life i'll never get back unfortunately

I'm a smart person now?
yay.

LostinBlanch

tech77 wrote: »

but i spelled it incorrectly that is all.
QUOTE]

Would you like to go back and edit that to spelt?

[I'm hanging up the grammar police badge now, honest].

Older forumistas will probably tell you that everything went to hell when they stopped teaching "proper" grammar in English.

I don't remember back that far though :cool:

pickarooney

tech77 wrote: »

Haha.
Spelling error no more.
I could easily dismiss that as a typo but i'll be honest and i won't.
A genuine spelling error does not constitute grammatical confusion as you know yourself.

In other words when using the phrase "i am loath" i am obviously aware loath is adjectival (meaning unwilling, reluctant etc) but i spelled it incorrectly that is all.
I am obviously equally aware that "I loathe" is the verb.

As i say spelling error, not grammatical confusion.

It's not obvious at all, considering they're not pronounced the same. And did nobody ever teach you to capitalise 'I' when used as a pronoun?

EamonnKeane

And anybody who reads three books a week does not lead a very interesting life.

But someone who watches 20 hrs of TV does?

pretty-in-pink

Immigration -- into a country ( Americans would call us immigrants for example)

Emmigration - out of a country (We would call the aforementioned people emmigrants)

Oh, and it seems Moses married Zipporah, while on the run from a murder rap.

Snarler

EamonnKeane wrote: »

But someone who watches 20 hrs of TV does?

Is that what you think?

tech77

LostinBlanch wrote: »

tech77 wrote: »

but i spelled it incorrectly that is all.
QUOTE]

Would you like to go back and edit that to spelt?

No I wouldn't.
How many times do i have to point out that the past tense of spell can be either "spelled" or "spelt".
Man!
See here

2 stroke

It's stupid to condem someone as stupid just because they can't identify the verb in a sentence. It is possible to speak and write correctly without knowing what a verb is.
I was doing some work for a primary school teacher during the week and she asked me to wire a plug for her. She said neither her or her husband, an accountant, could perform this simple task which I learned when I was 12. Yet I could hardly consider them stupid.
Some questions for the op. Can you wire a plug?, change a tyre?, sew?, weld?, tell the difference between roasting and baking. All of these things I can do, but I can't tell you if the last sentence is structured properly and referring to Pickarooney's last post I havn't a clue what a pronoun is but I almost always capitalise i when referring to myself.

humbert

2 stroke wrote: »

Some questions for the op. Can you wire a plug?, change a tyre?, sew?, weld?, tell the difference between roasting and baking. All of these things I can do, but I can't tell you if the last sentence is structured properly and referring to Pickarooney's last post I havn't a clue what a pronoun is but I almost always capitalise i when referring to myself.

How many of those things did you go to school to be taught how to do?

2 stroke

humbert wrote: »

How many of those things did you go to school to be taught how to do?

Capitalising i, I guess. I was probably taught what a pronoun was in school, but it is irrevelant to my life.
All the other things I learned outside school including learning to read.
Says a lot for our education system, doesn't it? Most of the things I was taught I do not know, yet I am capable of learning.

pretty-in-pink

I can sew, wire a plug and tell the difference between roasting and baking. These are things I learned in school. I can change a lightbulb, and I can speak English properly. Sometimes I choose not to. I didn't think that perfect grammer, spelling and a total knowledge of the structure of the english language were pre-requisites for posting on the internet. I thought the whole point was you posted, and relaxed and had fun.

Some stupidity is laughable, some is excusable. There is a fundamental difference between book-smarts and street-smarts. A mixture of the two is obviously ideal, but I'd much prefer to spend time with someone funny, down-to-earth and "under-educated" then with someone who is arrogant, condensending and "over-educated". Stupidity is not just limited to the facts and figures we know, it crosses social boundries too.

tech77

And did nobody ever teach you to capitalise 'I' when used as a pronoun?

Yes, in formal writing of course i capitalise my I's.

On the internet i'm lazy and i don't.
^^See.
Hell i (oops did it again...) only started to capitalise the first letter of sentences recently for internet postings. It's internet laziness nothing else.

See here

Also even in formal writing not capitalising I's could be regarded as modesty but that's stretching things.

It's not obvious at all, considering they're not pronounced the same.

Fair point.
But trust me i understand the difference between the adjectival and verb form. I'll work on my pronunciation though of "loathe" and "loath"- It'll help inform my spelling. My grammatical understanding of "loath" and "loathe" will be the same though (ie intact).

And before anyone else starts, any of the stuff above like starting a sentence with "But" or "And" etc i'm blaming on internet informality/laziness OK.

Anyway i'm off to trawl this guys posts to see what grammatical and syntactical errors he's guilty of. :rolleyes:

humbert

2 stroke wrote: »

Capitalising i, I guess. I was probably taught what a pronoun was in school, but it is irrevelant to my life.
All the other things I learned outside school including learning to read.
Says a lot for our education system, doesn't it? Most of the things I was taught I do not know, yet I am capable of learning.

I think it says more about you than the education system(not an insult, just a reflection of where your interests lie).

Not knowing how to do something because you were never shown how, and never had to learn, is a lot more excusable than not knowing something you spent years being educated in.

l3LoWnA

I couldn't tell you what the verb is in the sentence in question! I could fathom a guess but couldn't be sure. n I of being told I right very well and av Xtremly gud English.

If you were in a profession that involved writing, like letter/report writing OR indeed journalism, would you need to know on a daily basis what exactly is a verb? I believe not. Indeed, very few of us will need to display our knowledge of verbs for the rest of our lives. However, if you got the meaning of immigration/emmigration wrong in the article you were writing you'd have it all arseways, so how can you try and say that not knowing the difference of those two is less stupid than knowing, or being able to express your knowledge of, the ins and outs of grammar?!

In conclusion, I believe it's neither shocking nor stupid for any regular joe-soap not to understand what a verb is!

So there you go! :rolleyes:

Terry

What was the answer?

It was "Working", wasn't it?

I can't remember the exact wording and am too lazy to look.

I was taught that a verb is a "Doing" word.
I've no idea how I can remember back 20 or so years, but meh. couldn't be arsed.

Sinfonia

Terry wrote: »

What was the answer?

It was "Working", wasn't it?

I can't remember the exact wording and am too lazy to look.

I was taught that a verb is a "Doing" word.
I've no idea how I can remember back 20 or so years, but meh. couldn't be arsed.

"The man worked really hard"

Hitchhiker's Guide to...

I'd have to guess as well that a verb is something to do with 'an action', but it would be a guess. There is absolutely no need to know what a verb is - its actually more shocking that someone would waste their brain power trying to remember what a verb is.

2 stroke

not knowing something you spent years being educated in.

This is either, a reflection of the inability of the educator, or the irrelevance of what is being taught. Our education system is aimed at producing university professors. Imagine a world full of university professors and nobody to build a university.

Sinfonia

So she couldn't remember the definition of the word 'verb'.
I don't think this can be called stupidity, shocking or otherwise.
In fact, she probably knew, but just couldn't remember the difference between nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns etc. as terms.

I'll admit it's a fairly basic word, but as people have said, it's not something that everybody needs to remember for their daily lives, and explicit sentence deconstruction couldn't possibly be common.
When learning a language, yes, we need to know what a verb is.
Once the language is learned, however, we don't need this knowledge anymore.
It's kind of like scaffolding - you need it to construct the building, but you take it away when the building is finished (see what I did there, used 'building' as a noun, and then as a verb. I'm a genius

) .
Does the word 'verb' have any other use than being vocabulary to help one learn grammar?

Toto Wolfcastle

SumGuy wrote: »

So she couldn't remember the definition of the word 'verb'.
I don't think this can be called stupidity, shocking or otherwise.
In fact, she probably knew, but just couldn't remember the difference between nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns etc. as terms.

I'll admit it's a fairly basic word, but as people have said, it's not something that everybody needs to remember for their daily lives, and explicit sentence deconstruction couldn't possibly be common.
When learning a language, yes, we need to know what a verb is.
Once the language is learned, however, we don't need this knowledge anymore.
It's kind of like scaffolding - you need it to construct the building, but you take it away when the building is finished (see what I did there, used 'building' as a noun, and then as a verb. I'm a genius ) .

I agree. I know what a verb is, but I'm training to be an English teacher so I need to know. A lot of people probably do know what a verb is, and those who don't probably don't place any importance on it in their lives.

There are a lot of basic things that we learn in school over and over yet we don't necessarily remember all of them. Take for instance, Irish. We learn it throughout or school days, yet how many people could translate 'I am a man' into Irish? And it's a basic phrase learned in Primary Schools. I'd love it if you all proved me wrong now!

Anyway, a verb is an action word. Now you all know. Don't forget again!

2 stroke

It's kind of like scaffolding - you need it to construct the building, but you take it away when the building is finished (see what I did there, used 'building' as a noun, and then as a verb. I'm a genius ) .

I think you have put your foot in your mouth. Is take not the verb here?

Pherekydes

tech77 wrote: »

This follows on a bit from the -5, -6 thread below.

I was just watching "Are you smarter than a ten year old" on sky one with Noel Edmonds.

A contestant, a grown woman was asked what was the verb in this sentence "The man worked really hard" and she couldn't answer it.

I was literally shocked that
1) an adult could be that stupid
2) that that adult would then appear on national tv exposing this stupidity.

I'm constantly amazed by depths of ignorance/stupidity and yet these people it would seem function perfectly normally in society.

I'm thinking to myself maybe dumb IS the new world order and the way to go.

Incidentally that show is annoying in so many ways I don't know where to start...

Funniest thread ever. Thanks for starting it.

P.S. I would never have watched "Are you thicker than a ten year-old?" up to this, and thanks to this thread, I'm never going to.

P.P.S. Incidentally, you left a comma out of your final sentence above just after incidentally. Someone who is smarter than a ten year-old and can instantly recognise verbs (when under no pressure) would be smart enough not to leave out an important piece of punctuation like a comma. Have you ever been on a TV quiz show? Has anyone else in this thread? I have, and I humiliated myself. I got 11 out of 12 questions right, but it's the easy ONE you get wrong that nobody ever forgets. And I mean never. 20 years on I still get ribbed over it.

For the record, the question was, "Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Jaclyn Smyth and Kate Jackson appeared in what show as private detectives?"

Pherekydes

jimbo78 wrote: »

That reply reinforces what tech said. How you people manage to get dressed in the morning, Ill never know. I suggest immigrating to America (or is that emmigrating)

It's neither. The word you're grasping for is 'migrating'. And emigrating has one 'm'.

How do you get past putting on your socks?

Terry

SumGuy wrote: »

"The man worked really hard"

Wouldn't that be an adverb?

Slow coach wrote:

For the record, the question was, "Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Jaclyn Smyth and Kate Jackson appeared in what show as private detectives?"

Hello, Angels.

Sinfonia

2 stroke wrote: »

I think you have put your foot in your mouth. Is take not the verb here?

but you take it away when the building is finished

Actually, here, both 'take' and 'building' are verbs, even though 'building' could be construed as a noun, depending on context.
If not, then I've really put my foot in it now!

Sinfonia

Terry wrote: »

Wouldn't that be an adverb?

No, an adverb describes the manner in which the action was performed, e.g. 'quickly', so I think 'hard' is the adverb.

EDIT: 'Really' is also an adverb, so there are two adverbs in the sentence.

tech77

Terry wrote: »

Wouldn't that be an adverb?

No.

Seriously though this thread was not meant to be about spotting niceties of punctuation on internet posts.
It was simply about a woman who didn't know what a bloody verb was.

Toto Wolfcastle

Terry wrote: »

Wouldn't that be an adverb?

'Worked' is a verb in the past tense. The adverb is 'hard', in that an adverb in this case describes the manner in which the verb was conducted.

Or an adverb describes a verb. (And does many other things but this is the most common.)

God, now I know how my students feel. This is boring!