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First, here is a blog posting in the Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) by someone who administers grammar tests to prospective employees, explaining why
I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.
Second, I want to peeve about using poor simply to mean bad.
A person who eats too much has a bad diet, but not necessarily a poor one. A diet can be poor in nutrition, or poor in iron. That would also be a bad diet.
A doctor can be poor if she has made unwise investments, or if her mother recently died. If she accidentally overdoses a patient, she is a bad doctor, and not a poor one.
For me the distinctive of adjectival poor is that the noun must lack something. If it is bad, it has to be bad in a particular way, in the particular of lacking. So, a person could employ a poor vocabulary, lacking apt words, repetition of the same words. But poor grammar?
I don't think bad grammar lacks a particular quality, so what would make it poor? No subjunctive? No past tense? No plurals? No articles? I have it. Subject-verb alignment!
It really annoys me to see poor used adjectivally as a blanket synonym for bad. So it is ironic to me that the title of the article is "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar." (Didn't we once discuss a variant of Murphy's Law stating the more vitriol in your correcting someone's language, the greater your odds of making a language mistake within the correction?)
Am I alone in disliking this watered-down use of poor?
Did you see Geoff Pullum's response to that piece? It's somewhat tongue-in-cheek in its tone, but he makes some good (though for him, the same as usual) points, key among them the misuse of the word "grammar."
I don't feel what you're feeling about "poor," but here it's definitely weaselly shorthand for "disagrees with my opinions on how things should be."
English is a minefield isn't it, but in a non-lethal way?
'that disagrees' would be as good as 'disagreeing.' But 'disagrees' is not good because it disagrees with 'poor.'
This is not a grammar point because there is no grammar rule that requires parallelism, so it falls in the maybe 'good practice' category.
I have to admit that I've never thought about "poor", meaning "bad", as a misuse of the word. I think I've observed three main senses of the word and have until now accepted all of them:
"Lacking" in something, usually money but could be anything else. It's in this sense that asusena suggests that vocabulary (but not grammar) can be poor.
"Pitiable", as in "Poor Judd is dead". ("The daisies in the dell will give out a different smell because poor Judd is underneath the ground.")
"Bad", as in HBR blog.
I said that I've accepted all three uses, but now that Glenn's brought up the complaint I remember that we already have words for "bad", and "good"—too many of them, now—and more for "good person" and "bad person". As one of my favorite authors point out, we have lost the use of several words, such as "gentleman" and "bastard", because nowadays they're understood to mean only that the speaker approves or disapproves of their referent.
So we don't need "poor" to mean "bad", and I like distinctions; its original sense is still useful. I hereby undertake never again to use "poor" in the second sense above. Thanks for bringing it up, Glenn.
Speaking of distinctions, Grant, I'm going to disagree that "poor" (or "bad") simply means "not my idea of how things should be done". It's true that people use the former when they should have said the latter, but that's not because the two are the same; it's because they failed to consider adequately the distinction between the two.
Grant Barrett said
Did you see Geoff Pullum's response to that piece? ...makes some good... points, key among them the misuse of the word "grammar."
If so, the HBR blog that sparks this discussion is not even about 'poor grammar.' To list the specific complaints in there:
'think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis'
'scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun'
'can't distinguish between "to" and "too"'
'can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're'
'20 years to notice how to properly use "it's"'
Neither poor nor bad is the right word for these mistakes, they being so utterly simplistic and lacking of nuance. Just sloppy or careless.
English is a minefield.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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