Armchair Quarterback

upstater1

People know their Xs and Os though. Almost no one knows grammar.

I teach English Lit. in college, I can vouch for that second sentence (I'm talking about instructors, not students). If I asked a colleague what an ablative absolute was, they would look at my like I had two heads.

I buy PatinVa's argument that Scott failed at punning.

ctpatsfan77

A point from the Globe:

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wizwor

That's some pretty bad grammar, punctuation, typing, and capitalization, teach.

Keegs

if Bart does take any dirty shots that are clearly dirty.....

that's when you send in a backup to dive at the back of his knees.

And fellas, before you say it, i don't give a **** if you think my comment is inappropriate.

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robertweathers

Maybe I'm missing something but the mandate is directing players to keep trash talk outside the white lines. By white lines I am assuming he means the football out of bounds lines. My interpretation is that he is encouraging trash talk in the media but not on the field.

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RodThePat

Dude talks a big game for someone who has been absolutely invisible this season. He's been so quiet on the field that he feels like he has to do his talking out of it. What a douchebag.

PatsFanInVa

It just did.

I kid because I love.

To an extent, I buy your argument. If you study accepted style, however -- not even slang -- you find changes in grammar. For example, faulty parallelism is now accepted in all our mass media. (That's when you say "the car had red paint, blue paint, and went 100 miles per hour." Correct grammar dictates that "had" must apply to all the terms in the series, so you would end up with "The car had red and blue paint, and went 100 miles per hour.")

You don't notice the changes in grammar because by the time they're considered normal, by definition, you consider them normal.

So prescriptivists say you have to define normal, and stick to it, and descriptivists say that whatever the "new" version is, is correct, once enough people sign on.

And don't even talk to me, no pun intended, about spoken grammar.

As to the Xs and Os being harder, they are, but for a different reason. Your brain is wired from birth to assimilate language, and everybody around you is "coaching you up" from day one.

Your brain is not wired to play football, and certainly not to understand it at the Xs and Os level. (It is wired to understand things like tackling, at a basic level, but not in the most effective possible way.)

However, there are far more, and far more complex things going on in everyday grammar than on a football field. The playbook would be dozens of volumes, just to describe your "responsibilities" in everyday communication. Fortunately, the "playbooks" of grammar are greatly reduced by the ubiquitous familiarity each of us has with language.

DaBruinz

I am pretty sure the interpretation is meant to say that the league is ok with banter, However, once you start threatening a player's well-being, you've crossed the line.

It's my estimation that even the league felt that Scott's comments were a threat on Welker's well-being.

Fixit

Here's my pun: I hope someone ends Scott's career tomorrow.

I'm so tired of these f****** defensive thugs.