From: Mottel Gutnick
Date: May 16, 2006 12:33 AM
Subject: Feedback

"Dumb and stupid amount to the same meaning ..."

No they don't, at least not where I went to school (in Melbourne,
Australia). My high-school teacher for English Expression and
Literature would have been shocked at such a proposition, and quite
rightly so. Equating the two is not only killing the language with
incorrect usage, it is socially unacceptable, even harmful.

"Stupid" means having low intelligence. "Dumb" means "mute" i.e.
being unable to speak ( a condition usually associated with
congenital deafness).

Furthermore, you are probably also falling into the common pitfall
here of equating stupidity with ignorance. They too are not the same.
Those who incorrectly impute the kind of meaning you attribute here
to the term "dumb", usually mean that the person being described is
ignorant (i.e. uninformed), or an ignoramus (i.e. poorly educated in
general), but not necessarily stupid, because there are many ignorant
people who are nonetheless quite clever (i.e. intelligent). Ignorance
can easily be remedied by education, stupidity is not so easily
cured.

Equating "dumb" with "ignorant" or with "stupid" is a throwback to
the dark ages when dumb people (i.e. those who were mute - usually
those born deaf and dumb) were often uneducated because their
disability made ordinary learning methods inaccessible to them, and
what they did know they often could not adequately communicate.
Consequently, they were thought to be of inferior intelligence, a
great and unfair fallacy. Nowadays, modern teaching methods and sign
language have broken that nexus and and linking lack of speech to
lack of IQ or to ignorance is really an insult to those who suffer
from the former condition. Hellen Keller was deaf and dumb, but
highly intelligent, educated and a successful author.

Since you are campaigning for correct usage and the preservation of
the language, you should set a better example in your own prose and
avoid the colloquial but incorrect and harmful equation of "ignorant"
with "dumb" and certainly of "stupid" with "dumb".

Finally, a comment on your writing style: "amount to the same
meaning" is a very inelegant mixture of two turns of phrase. You
should either say that they "amount to the same thing" or they "have
the same meaning".

----------------

Another gripe about correct usage of English is the confusion that
abounds about which personal pronouns to use in the subject and
object case: It should be I / we for the former, and me / us for the
latter. You Americans are the ones most commonly guilty of misusing
these pronouns and it is now an all too common phenomenon to see this
misuse being propagated through your exported TV shows and movies.
This is very unfortunate because, sadly, TV is a significant
contributor to young people's linguistic education.

The best rule of thumb for choosing the correct pronoun is to
explicate the unspoken but implied trailing verb and apply it
explicitly to the subject or object of the sentence, as appropriate.
This is demonstrated in the two examples below, where the sentences
are repeated with the addition of the words in brackets.

The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that performs the
verb [action] or that causes the action to occur. The object is the
person or thing that the verb [action] occurs to.

In the following two sentences, the subject in both cases is "my
mother" and the object is "MacDonalds".

1) My mother likes MacDonalds more than me.

2) My mother likes MacDonalds more than I.

Both of these sentences are grammatically correct; they just have two
quite different meanings. However, if we assume the meaning most
likely intended by the speaker, only the second sentence is
grammatically correct, though most children would probably say (1)
when they really mean (2).

The meanings of the above two sentences are:

1) My mother likes MacDonalds more than [she likes] me.

Here, a second object (the speaker) is introduced at the end of the
sentence for the purpose of comparing the subject's affection for the
two objects. To make this clear, the verb is explicitly applied to
the second object as well as the first.

While this may sometimes be true of mothers of spoilt little brats
who are too accustomed to being treated to MacDonalds food, I doubt
that's what the speaker really meant. She probably meant:

2) My mother likes MacDonalds more than I [do].

Here, there is only one object (MacDonalds). A second subject (the
speaker) is introduced at the end of the sentence to compare the
relative intensity of each subject's affection for the object.

(Ditto for the "she" and the "her" - the former is used of a subject,
the latter of an object.)

The personal pronouns "I" and "me" are most commonly misused when one
of them is combined with another person, as in: "my brother and me"
or "my brother and I". To work out the correct usage, just apply the
verb to both persons individually. e.g.

1) My brother and [me / I] witnessed the accident.

2) The car hit my brother and [me / I].

In sentence 1, both persons are dual subjects of the sentence. They
witnessed. The object is the thing that was witnessed, the accident.

If you apply the verb to both subjects separately, you would say, "My
brother witnessed the accident and I witnessed the accident" (not "me
witnessed the accident"). Therefore the sentence should read "My
brother and I witnessed the accident."

In sentence 2, the subject is the car; that is what hit the two
siblings. The siblings are dual objects, the ones to whom the action
was done; the ones who were hit. If you applied the verb to each
object separately, you would say "The car hit my brother and the car
hit me" (not "the car hit I"). Therefore the sentence should read
"the car hit my brother and me."