"See me after class"?
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Prescriptivist peeving has faded from public discourse, but UK politics recently brought us a blast from the past:
@Conservatives red-penciled two incomplete sentences ("(I am) Absolutely thrilled…" and "(There is) lots to do…), which is a bit hypocritical since it's trivial to find similar things in xeets from Tory politicians, e.g. "(Do you) Want a better job or a bigger salary?" from the current party leader on August 12.
They also red-penciled a silly typo (or autocorrect error), "the be" for "to be".
And they seem to think that "For me there's no more important job for any government than […]" requires grammatical improvement. I'm puzzled as to what the perceived problem is, so I'm asking for help from readers who may have access to a more complete list of current UK Zombie Rules than I do.
Is it the lack of a comma after "For me"? Surely they'd just pencil in the allegedly missing comma.
Is it the extraposition of the than-clause ("no more important job […] than making sure that S" rather than "no job more important […] than making sure that S")? This seems like a possible peeve, although it's trivial to find elite sources for the split rather than post-nominal version.
Or do they just want a version with simpler syntax?
̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄
David Marjanović said,
August 17, 2026 @ 10:57 am
I wonder if the problem is the repetition of "for": "For me […] for any government" in the same sentence, indeed the same clause.
Keep in mind these are people who don't know that grammar, spelling and style are three different things.
Terry K. said,
August 17, 2026 @ 12:08 pm
Given that they suggest "there is" be added to the last paragraph, I'm thinking they also think "there's" in the middle paragraph should be "there is".
"There is" and "there's" are very stylistically different and my sense is that "there's" really is more fitting here.
I can imagine them thinking "In my opinion" or some such instead of "for me".
So, they caught one mistake that's clearly some sort of typing/entry error, and beyond that they just don't like the casual style, in a context where a casual style is not inappropriate.
CuConnacht said,
August 17, 2026 @ 12:55 pm
I was thinking that they wanted something like "In my opinion" rather than the arguably ambiguous "for me". But who knows?
NSBK said,
August 17, 2026 @ 1:04 pm
In my opinion (for me?) the only real problem here, considering the platform, is the typo.
And yet, I'd probably still give at best 5/10 for the "grammar" of the quoted post. The typo is literally at the third word in the first phrase, and proofreading your work is probably a good idea for a government's education minister, so they really could have done a lot better.
_shrug here, too_
Yves Rehbein said,
August 17, 2026 @ 1:49 pm
plural: peevings have.
abstract noun: the public discourse
abstract noun, again. Does but look like a determiner to you, maybe?
I cannot get to [the] end the [of] first sentence before my own insecurity about grammar kicks in, so I'll give it a 3/2 for rhythm.
Jerry Packard said,
August 17, 2026 @ 2:11 pm
For me, “For me there's no more important job than…” is completely OKified by insertion of ‘a’ before ‘job’, making it “For me there's no more important a job than…”
Michael Watts said,
August 17, 2026 @ 3:10 pm
That one is an interesting case; my instinct is that the most natural reading is different depending on the presence or absence of "Do you" at the beginning.
Specifically, "Do you want a better job or a bigger salary?" suggests to me "which of these two things do you want?", whereas "Want a better job or a bigger salary?" suggests "is either of these two things something you'd want?".
So I wouldn't be inclined to correct either version of the sentence to the other without knowing which interpretation was meant.
And, going to check on the tweet, I see that indeed it is using the interpretation that I felt the wording suggested. It isn't offering a choice between the options; it's saying that if you want either thing, conservative policies are the way to get there. I don't think Kemi Badenoch's usage falls into the same category as the sentences being criticized here.
My best guess as to the problem with "For me …" was the same as David Marjanović's: the sentence has two different for-phrases attached. It's not a grammatical error, but it's something I might prefer to reword.
Michael Watts said,
August 17, 2026 @ 3:23 pm
This comment is, in its entirety, utter garbage. The first "correction" offered converts something that is grammatically correct into something that is grammatically incorrect – peeving is not a count noun. The second one presents an alternative as if it were mandatory – "the public discourse" is an extant phrase with a meaning that is at best mildly different from anarthrous "public discourse". The third one presents a correct option with no alternative as if it were an error, then doesn't bother to provide a "correction", most likely because there is no alternative. (Unless you want to go all the way to something like "the internal politics of the United Kingdom".) Abstract nouns do not require determiners. They often don't permit the; nouns that are inherently definite sometimes require it and sometimes prohibit it. ("Mathematics is the study of things that are true and useful, while philosophy is the study of things that are true and useless.")
anon said,
August 17, 2026 @ 4:33 pm
This post reminds about a grammatical description of Kharia written fifteen years ago by John Peterson. He rejected all prescriptivist and Eurocentric frameworks, focusing entirely on how Kharia is spoken and written in real life. Absolute banger.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 17, 2026 @ 4:43 pm
I looked in the google books corpus for 21st-century sentences beginning "for me there's no." Here's one that seemed perfectly idiomatic (someone being quoted in a periodical titled _Business Review Weekly_): "For me, there's no better experience than visiting our stores and talking to our people." I do think the comma after "me" is useful in cuing the correct parse. Likewise the comma in (this is someone discussing the bronze statues of Rodin) "For me, there's no doubt about it." Here's a London-themed one (part of a more complex sentence but could stand alone): "for me, there's no comparison between E11 and W11."
The ones deprecated for being sentence fragments are in the wrong register for a normal/traditional school assignment. But tweeting is a different register, innit?
Joe said,
August 17, 2026 @ 5:42 pm
The double "for" is the only clunky thing about the second sentence, but it's not a grammar problem and it's not what's underlined.
If I were editing, I would recommend solving it by just deleting "For me". Why hedge such a strong statement of opinion by reminding us that it's only your opinion?
Between that and the typo, I do think this xeet shows an embarrassing lack of editing. But no grammar errors.
VVOV said,
August 17, 2026 @ 6:00 pm
Michael Watts: I assumed Yves Rehbein's comment was meant as a parody of the post by @Conservatives, not as an earnest correction of Mark Liberman's opening sentence. But now I'm unsure who has misunderstood whom here…
JPL said,
August 17, 2026 @ 8:35 pm
"… there's no job [that is] more important for any government …" perhaps would be less clumsy, but both are grammatical. Looks like nit-picking.
Condign Harbinger said,
August 18, 2026 @ 2:53 am
I think you're all missing the point here. I suspect it's because most of you have never been victims of concentrated and persistent bullying. The simple fact is that the "corrector" of the original email is not at all interested in the grammar (they pretend they are ignorant of register and email conventions, and treat it as a school essay to be marked), but, having nothing substantive to say about the contents, instead captiously pick on irrelevancies. Now I suspect Lucy Powell, being a career politician, is hardened to such stuff, but the intention of the "joke" is clear- to demean the object using any tool available.
Language is a lot more than words.
wgj said,
August 18, 2026 @ 2:55 am
What I find most problematic in that sentence is the confusion between "(no more) (important job)" and "no (more important) job", and I believe many if not most readers' first instinct is to intuit the former – i. e., "there's no important jobs for me any more".
Richard Hershberger said,
August 18, 2026 @ 5:38 am
@VVOV Look up "Poe's Law." This is a clear example.
Matt A said,
August 18, 2026 @ 11:44 am
Michael Watts – like VVOV, I assumed Yves Rehbein's comment was a parody (and I thought the part about giving "it a 3/2 for rhythm" was funny)
and
Condign Harbinger – I assumed that the fact that the tweet was intended "to demean the object using any tool available" was clearly implied both in the original post and (most of) the comments.
Now I'm not sure if I was assuming too much or not
Yves Rehbein said,
August 18, 2026 @ 4:46 pm
Well, it wouldn't be fun if there wasn't also a kernel of truth to it. I mean, the UK's politics is feasible and – my point being – more conservative. I intended not to dwell on it.
Speaking of, the dative construction of "for me" is apparent from German ("Mir ist nichts wichtiger …").
wgj said,
August 18, 2026 @ 11:57 pm
The simplest fix for the "double for" is to change "important for me" to "important to me", no?
Michael Watts said,
August 19, 2026 @ 1:16 am
I mean, the UK's politics is feasible
But not as an alteration to "UK politics". Note that politics is anarthrous in both phrases.
Pedro said,
August 20, 2026 @ 4:00 am
Clearly what's happened here is that the Education Secretary has posted a tweet containing a typo ("Thrilled the be appointed" should be "thrilled to be appointed") and the Tories have leapt on it. But rather than point out a single typo they've concocted a few more corrections, to give the impression that the tweet is riddled with errors.
I can't think of any prescriptivist reason to change "For me there's no more important job".
Yves Rehbein said,
August 20, 2026 @ 7:11 am
I wonder that the is not a mistake, perhaps eye-dialect, you know your woulda's and haefta's, but with an approximant like [ɾə] (US, after a vowel) or something else in the same spirit. The vowel is at this point just a schwa in unstressed position.
Chris Button said,
August 29, 2026 @ 10:50 am
I would have suggested changes in different areas from the highlighted ones:
"For me there's no more important job for any government …" should omit "for me" because it begs the question whether it is "for me" or "for the government"
"Lots to do and I look forward… " lacks a comma after "do"
"… making sure young people have the best education, the best opportunities and the best future they can" should omit "they can"
But, aside from the minor typo, I too see nothing egregious in the post.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 29, 2026 @ 2:55 pm
About that, I was wondering that for(e) has multiple etyma, compare Latin per, pre and pro, in German fuer mich, vor, bevor, French pour ma part (for me, i.e. in my opinion) and apres (before), but it doesn't really work for me.
Andrew Usher said,
August 30, 2026 @ 3:04 pm
Chris Button's first two changes are certainly right (and the first was suggested by others, and would have been by me – it's a rhetorical exaggeration, of course, but adding "for me" doesn't change that, it just creates the ambiguity he mentioned as well as weakening the statement undesirably) but I wonder why he proposes to omit "they can". Without it, one has an incomplete comparison; in speech, one might repeat it for each of the three phrases, but this is an abbreviated post. Is the problem that it sounds like a singular 'they'? – it isn't, the antecedent is 'people'.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 30, 2026 @ 4:10 pm
*French apres means "after, but d'apres [personne] can also mean something like "in somebody's opinion".
Chris Button said,
August 31, 2026 @ 5:47 am
@ Andrew Usher
Then I would put "can" after "people":
"… making sure young people can have the best education…"
Andrew Usher said,
September 6, 2026 @ 9:59 pm
On consideration that still doesn't seem an improvement. It literally is right, yes, but ending the sentence with 'the best future' sounds off, which is presumably why 'they can' was added in the first place. One would be better off rewriting in that case.