Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 February 3

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February 3

Need help figuring out the name of a book

I think this is the right place to ask. If it's not, feel free to move. I read the book (series, actually) in the late 90s. I remember it involved genetic engineering of some sort and several teens who, somewhat predictably, ended up having to save the world. They each had different superpowers. One could travel through time. One could manipulate electricity (think Storm from the X-Men). One could talk to some sort of bug (ants maybe?). I believe it was 6 book series. It definitely did not last long. Dlong (talk) 04:22, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm drawing a blank on searching for this, as your description uses pretty common words. Can you think of any other details, like buildings, clothing, gadgets, or enemies? It usually helps to find some fairly rare word that would be used in a description. Also, this is a novel, and not a comic, right? Bovlb (talk) 06:01, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Was this series aimed at young adults? Tesseran (talk) 21:23, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it was aimed at young adults. To be quite honest, I can't remember much more about the series. Otherwise I'm sure I would have been able to find it with google. There was another series that I liked reading that was also 6 books long and I believe (although am not positive) that it was by the same author. Unfortunately, the stuff I remember about that series is fairly genetic as well. In the series, space travel was possible and the moon was colonized as well as another planet (Mars, or maybe one its moons?). Some genius kid turned out to be a clone and had two other duplicates running around, so there was one on each world. As is typical in these types of situations, one of the clones was the evil clone and tried to take over the world (or I guess the solar system in this case). Finally there was one final series (also 6 books, interestingly enough) but I remember so little about it that I doubt it'll help much. I know there was some magic involved and parallel universes, but that's really it. Dlong (talk) 16:31, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Yours is really more a question for the Humanities desk than for the Language desk. You may, however, want try posting a query to the Usenet group rec.arts.sf. written, which is really good with questions like yours. Title your post something like "YASID: six-book YA series" ("YASID stands for "yet another story ID"), and be sure to describe everything you remember about the books, as well as when you read them. (You may want to just paste the messages you posted here.) Deor (talk) 17:01, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Off of?

Is it grammatical to say "He got off of the ride"? Or should it be "He got off the ride"? I've always thought the former was correct, but someone recently changed a sentence to the latter, saying it wasn't grammatical. seresin | wasn't he just...? 19:31, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

According to the OED, 'off of' can be either archaic, colloquial or regional. 'Of' is modern standard English (whatever that means). Algebraist 20:00, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

It's one of the many idiosyncrasies of the English language that irritate simple-minded people with simple-minded notions about what constitutes 'good grammar'. They don't end sentences with prepositions, always ask for whom you're looking, and never begin a sentence with a conjunction. In this case, the reasoning (and I use the word 'reasoning' quite wrongly) is that redundancy is bad, and if "He got off the bus" is good enough, then "He got off of the bus" must be wrong. Of course, English has never worked this way and never will. Their rules are post-hoc rationalizations. Lantzy ^talk 20:28, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

It does appear to be a mainly North American usage, however. (Not that there's anything wrong with that). -- JackofOz (talk) 20:41, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

No, it is (or used to be when I was young) common in British colloquial use, particularly as a variant of the equally colloquial 'off' = 'from': I got it off of Cliff."". --ColinFine (talk) 21:01, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

In this colloquial use, is it "off of" or "off off"?  --Lambiam 22:51, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

'Off of', always. Algebraist 23:08, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

"Off of" is pretty much standard in speech around here (Middle Atlantic). "Get offa [off of] me", for instance, is invariable when somebody is on somebody else who objects to their being there. Standard English does exist, however, despite all our efforts to define it, and it demands "He got off the ride", which is what I would make it if I were copyediting and ran across "He got off of the ride". There is no perfect way to settle any disagreement about this locution, though: You can read all the great writers from Shakespeare on and internalize their English. Or, you can search the corpus for the two phrases and winnow by quality of source. Or you can take my word for it, which is what I recommend. --Milkbreath (talk) 23:24, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Searching Shakespeare will give you Henry VI part II II.i.98 'a fall off of a Tree'. As I said above, it's an archaism among other things. Algebraist 00:43, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

So are there any important voices on English grammar that have said something about this? seresin | wasn't he just...? 05:34, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Here is one. [Word for the Day: "williwaw"] --Milkbreath (talk) 12:11, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Partridge's Usage and Abusage states: "of in off of is a Cockneyism and incorrect. Off from may in certain cases be allowed, but away from, down from, would always be better." R L Trask suggests "Though it is common in vernacular speech, especially in the USA, the preposition off of is not acceptable in standard English." Gwinva (talk) 08:35, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

In that case I say Eric Partridge can't be trusted for his prescriptivist nonsense; he won't get anything off of me for sure. ;) I was willing to give Trask a little more respect, but it judging from the responses here from Americans, that quote doesn't quite seem to be reliable. --Kjoonlee 18:08, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

It's easy to say "prescriptivist" with disdain, and kind of fun, too. But not everyone who rcommends you actually learn the language you speak is a prescriptivist. It would be remarkable if, with no effort on your part, the blah-blah-blah you learned from your idiot friends on the street wherever you grew up or from your dim-witted teachers turned out to be sufficient for the purposes of creating literature or persuading the powerful. "Off of" is non-standard in the setting provided whether we like it or not. --Milkbreath (talk) 21:08, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Bah humbug. ;) --Kjoonlee 06:01, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

While off of certainly is colloquial, it is not wrong. And while Partridge certainly knew a lot and was hardly nonsensical, he often does strike one as too close to normativity/prescriptivism for comfort. Bessel Dekker (talk) 00:36, 9 February 2008 (UTC)