Hi Amy,
First, if you'll forgive my saying
so, I think you read me wrong when you felt annoyed by me throwing examples to prove my points. I was not trying to prove
either you or Hancu wrong but to look for a different answer from just a simple
‘No’ or ‘Bad’. You do understand how learners would feel when they receive
such a terse and clipped response – I believe. And often such response would
force learners to ask for further clarification. The whole exchange becomes less productive and ineffective.
‘You is stupid’ is definitely wrong no matter how we look at it.
However, any phrase, especially a noun phrase with proper order of words, in
itself can only be inappropriately / inelegantly used, but ‘bad’, which has a wide range of meaning.
Of course, ‘These days’ in place of ‘Nowadays’ is better than ‘In these days’.
However, the latter in itself is not ‘bad’.
I believe students would
appreciate if teachers can go one-step further telling them that the usage of a
phrase does not fit in this way but it would fit well in another way – even
when the ‘another way’ is rare. Without a follow up, it could be potentially
easy for the students to make another mistake when they think its usage is
wrong everywhere, in every application. That is more damaging – I think!
Yes! You are right – I am very stubborn. My most loved teacher
said so to me too. I would not accept his teaching if he kept telling me, “it
is wrong” without any further explanation. And if he kept wiggling out of his way
by saying nobody uses it, I would come back to show him otherwise if I do find
people use it effectively. To me, teaching is the
most honored profession because it is done for the benefits of the students
more than for those of the teachers. The more one does in a volunteering job, the
more one needs to work harder; the more one is honored, the more one needs to show
care. Those are just virtues of givers anyway.
You did exactly what I expected from a good teacher. You
explained and gave examples when you felt that I did not quite grasp the connection
between ‘In’ and ‘days’ as I made a questionable observation through the plural
connection.
You also offered ‘In
those days,’ to replace ‘In these
days,’. However, as soon as I saw that offer, I sensed that you were
telling me that the use of ‘these’ is
odd, because ‘In those days’ does not even fit well with the original question,
which looked for a ‘now‘ meaning. As I said earlier, I did not see the oddity of 'In these days' (and I still do not). That is the reason why I kept throwing examples! In fact, if you search for “[In these days,”
you should find a lot of hits and they are used by many professional writers (if
you allow me to add lawyers to the group ![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)
).
In short, what I have been looking for is an explanation to why
‘In these days,” or 'In these days and ages,' is bad. You
said that people might use them a) for special reasons, b) for their ‘company
slang’, or c) without realizing of making mistakes. No matter what, when reputable
organizations publish their works for public reading, they must be aware of the
potential impact of every element in prints in spite of usage rarity. Within a
group of scholars, oddity does not go unnoticed! They do not think it is odd,
but you do. Therefore, I need to know, where such an oddity in your thought
comes from. As a learner, I would be regarded as a fool to tell those writers ‘In
these days,” is bad English. However, as a scholar in the art of using
English, you should be able to defend yourself when people ask you why you
think so.
Thank you for your assessment about my analyzing ability.
However, with what I got, I still don’t know why ‘these’ is such a bad word to
use in the context of ‘In these days,’ (starting a sentence and is followed by
a comma). Again, it can be inappropriate with an attached context, a relationship to something, but it cannot
be ‘bad’ just by itself.
Thanks and Best Regards,
Hoa Thai