Good English

Good English


"Good" English does not exist. Only English exists. Spoken English and written English.*

"Good" and "bad" are either moral or aesthetic judgments. They are, therefore, subjective judgments. It's also possible to make objective judgments about English. For example, "This sentence is (un)grammatical". Sometimes, however, grammaticality varies by dialect, so a judgment about grammaticality is only a relatively objective judgment. "She's in hospital" is grammatical in British English, but not in American English, which requires "She's in the hospital". Grammatical English is not necessarily "good" or "bad"; neither is ungrammatical English necessarily "good" or "bad". All English is "good" or "bad" depending on context. Context includes the speaker or writer, the listener or reader (the audience), the purpose of the English, and the type of discourse in which it appears. "Good" English in a war novel may be "bad" English in a fairy tale or other type of children's story. Essentially, "good English" is English I like and "bad English" is English I don't like. Good and bad are in the eyes and ears of the beholder.

*(I would classify signed English (e.g., American Sign Language) as one type of written English because it must be seen to be understood. Braille must be touched to be understood, so it's another type of written English. Because I'm not fluent in either ASL or Braille, I don't want to deal with them. My comments here apply only to spoken and written English.)

Windows 8

The OS on my new Acer Aspire 1 is Windows 8. I like Win 8. It's not as convenient as Win 7, I'll admit, but that's only because the Acer desktop doesn't have a Start Menu button. I really like drop-down menus. I hate touchscreen tiles. Last weekend I bought a new ASUS-Google Nexus 7 (2) with 32 GB of storage. I used it for an hour and hated every second of it. There's nothing wrong with it except that it's a tablet. I gave it to my 16-year-old son. He was thrilled. He's been playing with his Android OS HTC smartphone for the past 18 months and knows Android really well. He also likes touchscreens. I'm strictly a Windows guy. Once I add a Start button to my desktop, I'll be happier with Win 8.

This machine is just a netbook, but it works well, and it's fast enough. I can even get work done on it because it's got a keyboard and a mouse. It's got an 11" non-touch screen. I can make the font big enough to read. The keyboard is solid. The keys feel good. The CPU is relatively fast for a netbook. I used to use a 10" EeePC to edit biomedical papers every day. And before, that, I used to use a 9" EeePC. Both were fine. This is better. I don't need instant connectivity. But the boot time is much faster than my Core i5 desktop's, and when I wake the netbook up, it's almost instant on, unlike my Core i5 ASUS notebook.

I don't understand why people who understand how to operate Win XP or Win 7 have problems with Win 8. I think most of them are just MicroSoft haters. I'm no MS lover myself. I don't love any corporations, and they don't love me, so I figure that we're even on that level. It must be a religious war.