why do we need to study english?

And now, an discussion exercise for you, the readers...

The following are good:
Keep alive
Keep cold
Keep beautiful
Keep quiet
Keep rich
Keep free
Keep happy
Keep busy

The following are unnacceptable!!:
Keep warm
Keep loud
Keep healthy
Keep full
Keep empty
Keep sad

Ok that's good! can you tell me why/how you divvied them up like you did

Ok that's good! can you tell me why/how you divvied them up like you did

Keep alive is something everyone should be doing... also reminds me of that Bee Gees song.
Keep cold is good because clearly everyone loves cold weather.
Keep beautiful puts a positive message upon everyone who reads it!
Keep quiet is grammatically correct, which gets extra points.
Keep rich also is great, because being wealthy is, like, good and stuff.
Keep free - has an underlying theme of being happy in life and being shackled by nobody's chains. You are your own man!!
Keep happy, of course, is good because everyone should smile.
Keep busy is grammatically correct, which gets extra points.

Keep warm is like, bad, because I dislike warm weather.
Keep loud is not a positive message because you might damage your ears and/or disturb people around you!
Keep healthy - hm. I forgot why I put this here. Uh... um, something something exercise is bad?
Keep full is implying a negative message of constant, no-holds-barred consumerism.
Keep empty... nobody should be empty inside, and for that matter, nobody should be empty inside al of the time.
Keep sad - see above!

Good:
Keep (it) alive.
Keep (it) cold.
Keep (it) quiet.
Keep (it) happy.
Keep (it) busy.
Keep (it) warm.
Keep (it) healthy.
Keep (it) empty.

Less good:
Keep (it) beautiful
Keep (it) rich.
Keep (it) sad.
Keep (it) free.
Keep (it) full.

So the primary qualification for the first list is "have I heard it before?" If I have and it seemed natural in context it gets an automatic pass.

Some of these sound better with the word "Stay" instead of "Keep' but it depends on the context. (example: "Keep (it) quiet" evokes more of a demanding image, but "Stay (no subject) quiet" sounds more like the speaker is also going to remain quiet.)

In general I think the rule is context. If a viable context for the phrase comes to mind, the phrase is much more likely to be placed in the "Good" column.

Maybe a secondary rule is "is it a noun?"
"Keep (it) beautiful" sounds powerfully Engrish to me. Maybe because it is a clear adjective? Whereas others (but by no means all) on the list are passable nouns. Of course the context rule supersedes that.

Empty vs Full - easier to keep something empty than to keep it full, hence easier context.
Happy vs Sad - difficult (or perhaps unpleasant) to conceptualize someone asking to keep something sad.

This is a fun excersize Schazer! Thanks!

Keep (it) real!

Yeah see I thought full and free were untenable until I thought up "Keep (the car's gas tank) full" (because it's less efficient when it's getting close to empty) and "Keep (your Saturdays) free" (because there's something which is liable to use that timeslot).

There's something disquieting about looking at a sentence like "You can eat rice every day to keep your health" and knowing it's wrong but not being able to explain why.

(My logic went "you can only use "keep" to verb several specific nouns, like animals or habits" > "you can use "keep" on some adjectives, but some arbitrarily sound weird" > "It's about intent? Maybe? It sounds weird unless you're actively doing something, for a logical reason")

And now, an discussion exercise for you, the readers:

Which of the following are grammatically incorrect and/or stylistically displeasing words to fill in Keep (subject optional) _________?

-alive
-warm
-cold
-beautiful
-quiet
-loud
-healthy ~ iffy
-rich
-full
-empty
-busy
-free
-happy
-sad

"stay" works a lot better for most of these, I think.

Edit: I only considered "Keep" <word>, I didn't add a subject for any of them.

It seems "keep" has the connotation of physically holding something. Which would mean you can use "keep" best when it's associated with a physical object.

"Keep (the dog) happy/sad/healthy/fertile/beautiful" all work reasonably well because you have a physical object in mind.

The physical connotation also helps to give it a forceful tone. "Keep it secret. Keep it safe."

"Keep your health" is difficult because "your health" is much more abstract. Difficult for you to hold your own health, or beauty in your hands. "Stay" works better in that case because it's already a word that applies to a internal state rather than an external object.

"Keep the love." is bad but
"Keep the peace." Is good. (Invokes an image of protection, which is necessary to keep objects.)

I think idioms that use "keep" also exploit the idea of turning abstract concepts into a physical ones ("Keep your wits about you.")

You can also have "keep" mean "persist":
Keep your eyes on the prize.
Keep truckin'.
Keep trying.


(As a side note, I don't think "Keep (subject optional) ______" is not really a thing. Leaving out the subject just means that the imparative "you" takes the role of the subject. "Keep quiet" is "You keep quiet")

Keep (it) ...

SpoilerShow

• alive
  
• warm
  
• cold
  
• happy
  
• quiet
  
• healthy
  
• full

But not...

SpoilerShow

• empty
  
• busy
  
• free
  
• sad
  
• beautiful
  
• loud
  
• rich

This is fascinating, seeing what other people accept for the use of "keep". I made mine based off of whether or not I could make a sentence with them.

(As a side note, I don't think "Keep (subject optional) ______" is not really a thing. Leaving out the subject just means that the imparative "you" takes the role of the subject. "Keep quiet" is "You keep quiet")

I'm not sure what point you're trying to get at with all those double negatives exactly, but I meant it more in the specific context of this exercise. (Also back-editing this post it was a badly phrased question brought upon again by Shit Grammatically Going Off Around Me I Take For Granted As A Native English Speaker)

I had to go look this up but yeah, for who knows what fuckin reason when you've got an imperative sentence in English it often drops the subject pronoun. Which is why some adjectives work fine because they're congruent with state-it's-reasonable-to-ask-a-human-listener-to-maintain (quiet, warm) but others sound weird unless you add a subject/pronoun after "keep" to clarify. (Keep him busy, keep the radio on, keep your afternoon free, keep the ingredients cool, keep your essay topic specific, keep your rate of talking slow.).

Then there's a bunch of other shit which I don't think ever fits simply because it's physically impossible for the imperative'd listener to work to keep the subject in its requested state. In what context (or with what <something>) could one "Keep <something> expansive", or "Keep <something> rich"?

It was more like "which adjectives work proceeding keep? Do some work ok just as keep <adjective> but do others need some kind of subject added in there? Why/how the heck?"

Conversely Keep precedes verbs (like "Keep trying" "Keep walking" "Keep being <human-congruent adjective>") with much less fuss so I'm much less vexed by those.

Also I forgot to mention this earlier but please don't use the word "Engrish" in this thread again. Or just in general, Thanks

If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?

I would go to Germany and I would eat Potate.
I would go to Amerika and I would eat humberger.

I would go to England and I would go to Hogwarts castle.
I would go to Guam and I would go shopping in a fancy clothes store.

I would go to Shizuoka Prefecture and I would drink green tea.
I would go to Hawaii, America, Paris and London, and I would swim, sightsee.

I would go to <Akari's house>.
(Footnote by student: <There isn't anywhere I want to go (•́_•̀)>)
I would go to space and I would terraform planets.

fuck why you gotta do this to a linguistics minor i'm going to be thinking about this for like a week but not have have the knowledge to actually answer it


Let's see, for me:

SpoilerShow

Good
-warm
-cold (but I'm not sure when you'd want to tell someone to keep cold)
-quiet
-busy

Bad
-alive
-beautiful
-loud
-rich
-healthy
-full
-empty
-free
-happy
-sad

For context, I'm a native English speaker from California.

My guess is for me "Keep X" is not a productive rule that you can put new adjectives in but there's specific phrases I've heard that work?

For me at least it's not whether "(it)" can go in between them, since that doesn't seem to be how the syntax tree breaks down for me. If you're telling someone to keep warm, there's no other thing that you want to be warm, you want the listener themself to stay warm.

It also is totally reasonable for -ing verb phrases to generally fit even though adjectives generally don't, I just think that means they're being verb phrases and not being adjective-ish things if that makes sense?

Edit:
Looking on Google NGrams, these definitely seem like things it's attested at least some people have said (besides the ones I say):

SpoilerShow

Keep alive (Them was the Days, Panchatantra) (also i didn't read them or look into them at all so this isn't an accusation or anything but there's a chance one or both of these might be racist people trying to imitate some other people so it might not be 100% true that anyone would actually say this just based on google ngrams)
Keep beautiful (Pennsylvania Journal of Health, Physical Education, Recreation)
Keep loud (Poetry Ireland - Issues 1-19 - Page 8) (but like, in a poem, is that going to be someone talking normally?)
Keep healthy (Keeping Healthy, Healthy, that's me: a health education curriculum guide for Head Start, The cooperative development of an elementary science program in the ...) (this definitely seems like something that's normal for a lot of people to say)
If you count "free from X" or "free of X" is basically just the adjective "free", then I've found a lot of examples of that and also I find that a normal thing to say.
Keep happy (The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelfth Annual Collection - Page 26, Angels Can Fly Because They Take Themselves Lightly: How to Keep ...)

SpoilerShow

Keep rich did seem to be used in like the 19th century to mean stay rich, not sure if that counts for you?
Keep full maybe seems like something people have said in that context, but again only in a super old case, and maybe in context here they're saying to keep an implied object full which isn't the same structure?
"Keep empty cans/bottles/etc" is such a common thing to say that I can't tell if people say keep empty without something after it
I didn't really see "keep sad" either, but that might not be because it doesn't make sense syntactically or semantically to say, but just because it would be a mean thing to say.

It looks like other people are comfortable with more cases of "Keep [adjective]" than I am. At this point, if I had to guess, I'd guess that around the 19th century "Keep [adjective]" was a productive rule that made sense to say with any adjective, meaning and structured like "Stay [adjective]", but that now the only examples of it that work (at least for me) were specific examples that stuck around as idioms?

Let me know if anything I wrote didn't make sense, because I'm sure that's the case haha

you need to study english because it's arbitrary and you must learn all 200000 dialects to function properly in this society

I'm not sure what point you're trying to get at with all those double negatives exactly

Apologies, the double negative was the result of the rephrasing/editing that accompanied the post. Both negatives found their way into the final draft. But it seems that the point came across. Just like with your original prompt, the main idea was there. I apologise if the terseness came off as being critical. I meant it as an observation on a thought-provoking question.

SpoilerShow

Also I forgot to mention this earlier but please don't use the word "Engrish" in this thread again. Or just in general, Thanks

So I realize that word choice must invoke a very different image to me. Honestly, I was thrown off by the critique. The image I intended to share was one of the "bad English" that tends to accompany poor translations found on various products. I don't think referencing that... phenomenon is inherently offensive. (My goal at the time was to say that "Keep beautiful" just sounded like the kind of uplifiting, but slightly off-sounding message someone might find on a cheerful bag or lunchbox.)

Thinking about it, however I think that my only exposure to that term had to do with products. You don't work with products, though, your work is with people. In that context, a term often used to snicker at an unexpected phrase could be seen as damaging or belittling a person, which was never my intention. (And in this case, it's not just people, it's students, and let's be real, fuck anyone who mocks my kids)

Perhaps a synonym for this phenomenon could be "Macaronic Marketing"? "Bad English Products" might do as well. This is not something that needs to be addressed if you don't want to (hence the spoiler), but I am curious if there are more connotations I'm missing?

my favorite foods... potate and humberger

If you had a time machine, what time period would you travel to? (Part 2)

I would travel to the future, and meet my girlfriend.
I would travel to the Uruk period, and meet Gilgamesh.

I would travel to the future, and see what it looks like.
I would travel to forty years ago, and see what was on TV.

I would travel to seventeen years ago, and see the place where I was born.
I would travel to the past, and dress up my younger self.

I would travel to the Showa period, and meet my mother as a child.
I would travel to the Creataceous period, and I would see Tyrannosaurus.

I would travel to the Edo period, and be the Daimyo.
I would travel to the Azuchi Momoyama period and stop the Honnoji Incident.

Keep free the spirit of discovery, keep alive the desire to innovate, and keep empty the coffers of dogma.

Maybe I've just learned so much Latin and done enough that it messes with my grammatical structure??

Seeing all these responses is really cute though. Keep up the good work!!

Man, Gilgamesh. That would be cool.

edit: That is, if he didn't kill you on sight for sport. He seems like the kind of guy who would do that.

Puzzle time!

One of my student's katakana (the "alphabet" used primarily for foreign words) is somewhat messy, meaning I misread her time travel plans as follows:

"I would travel to the Wa-ma empire and I would see Emperor Newa."

What was my student trying to write?

Roman, Emperor Nero
(Less sure about "Nero")

Emperor Nerva

Roman, Emperor Nero
(Less sure about "Nero")

Ding ding ding!

the katakana for "ro" looks like this: ロ
the katakana for "wa" looks like this: ワ

my student had written them in a weird way without closing the bottom so what should've been ローマ and ネロ because ワーマ and ネワ.

Shoutout to Pinary though and his great answer he sent me of the Eerrdma Empire.

Keep free the spirit of discovery, keep alive the desire to innovate, and keep empty the coffers of dogma.

I really dig this btw

Shouldn't it be ニロ, not ネロ?

If you wrote down the katakana to transcribe the spoken word, sure. But if you see it written down it's "Ne", which is ね・ネ and not に・ニ

Also I'm not sure if this factors in in this particular case but many Japanese gairaigo (foreign loan words, written customarily in katakana) come from languages other than English (hence why Japan's word for Rome is pronounced "Roma", Germany is "Doitsu" and our buddy Aristotle in Japanese is アリストテレス.)

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Which of the following are grammatically incorrect and/or stylistically displeasing words to fill in Keep (subject optional) _________?

-alive
-warm
-cold
-beautiful
-quiet
-loud
-healthy
-rich
-full
-empty
-busy
-free
-happy
-sad

I know I'm late to the party, but I think all of these are acceptable.