The same rules apply to gods, according to Terry Pratchet
Some of the earliest religions were just trying to figure out this whole ‘words’ thing. Describing abstracts consistently was developed over time across generations, sometimes very strictly.
It’s dangerous not to believe
I rattle my kitchen drawers at least once a week
Take my S word.
Gonna go on Countdown with the line “Dictionaries aren’t rule books, they’re record books” and fight Susie Dent.
deleted by creator
Académie Française: <<Ahem – pardon et moi?>>
You mean <<pardonnez moi?>>
“pardon et moi” means “pardon and me”. “pardonnez moi” means “pardon me” (in a polite / respectful tense).
It still works, it can mean: sorry but how do I exist if it isn’t a rulebook?
LOL you got me – I flunked French . (Please don’t tell le Académie!) 😄
Delightfully failing to be either but with a huge sense of superiority and disdain for the youth and migrants.
“Le Weekend.”
“Je suis overbooké”
Zut alors!
Try it, she’ll fuck you up with a bike chain (her weapon of choice in pub fights)
The problem is that people frequently use this type of argument when they are unable to spell or follow the basic rules of syntax and grammar instead of simply admitting they’re wrong.
Language does change, over time and across many cultures. It doesn’t mean that anything you write is automatically correct.
Wrong according to… who? Who is the authority? Who granted them that power? By what mechanism can one appeal their decision?
What is “correct”?
There are standards, but you can only really say something is “wrong” or “incorrect” in relation to a particular standard. You typically wouldn’t write “senator yeeted his hat lol fr” as a newspaper headline. That doesn’t follow the standards for that context. But that doesn’t mean it’s “wrong” in some universal sense.
Correct according to who? You? Lol
Fortunately, you are not the arbiter of the English language.
That’s what I was just saying to you, so I’m confused why you think that’s a rebuttal.
You said things people write aren’t automatically “correct” without defining what correct means.
You’ll be corrected by someone with enough education to believe they are correct. English speakers police the English language in a very unorganised way.
There are no appeals. Accept that you were wrong or find a reputable style guide or dictionary that supports your position and tell the person who corrected you to get lost.
New words happen, but if you can’t get the right spelling of “they’re” or “their”, “your”, “you’re” or “yaw”, “its” or “it’s”, etc or use a unique spelling of a word I can point out in a dictionary how you’re wrong
If you mismatch brackets or do odd punctuation I can point out how it looks bad or reads wrong
I’m not surprised that you’re confused
You seem to be trying to be smug after you’ve communicated badly. Additionally, your understanding of how language works is not widely accepted.
The fact that you don’t understand your argument is facile and easily undermined only highlights your lack of understanding and maturity.
Your personal opinion doesn’t count as something being “widely accepted”.
I’ve always been a big advocate of the idea that the only part of communication that matters is communication. If people understand you then congrats you’ve successfully languaged
What if people understand you, but they think you’re stupid?
Congratulations! You did the best you could…
That’s their problem. I always assume the stupid people are the ones that are so inflexible and uncreative, that they don’t understand that language is entirely an amorphous flexible human creation.
The flip side of that is that if the words you’re using are wutdownrerary, you should be told to stop using those words because by using them you make communication harder.
Does “glizzy” (e.g. hotdog) fit under this classification?
glizzy
I’ve never heard that term, and wouldn’t know what it meant.
I literally gave the definition
Just going to share this little gem again…
I love militant descriptivists
we love you too
As a l33+ |><|@z0r, I’m here to criticize your command of the English language.
You just described 90% of Lemmy users.
And still I maintain that “alot” is not a word.
Mine, too! I hope Allie is doing well these days.
She made a reddit comment a couple months ago
God i love alot
I’ve noticed a tendency of people to combine words that are frequently seen together: “alot”, “aswell”, “noone”, etc.
Some of these catch on, like “nevertheless” and “whatsoever”. Maybe eventually “alot” and “noone” will become standard English, too.
The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don’t bat an eye at went the same way. “another” is the perfect example, it’s just “an other” combined.
It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.
The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.
“An apron” is the modern usage of the word “napron”, and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for “a” and/or “an” resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.
Apart/a part is another one.
“Apart” and “a part” are opposites, though. If you’re a part of something, you can’t be apart from it.
Yes, and increasing number of people are using the former to mean latter.
I recall “noone” being taught as acceptable by my english teacher back in 2004. That being said, she’s also said some things that ended up being very wrong
Whenever someone says “Noone wanted this” I always picture a big Irishman who has a deep appreciation for stuff Internet people are against.
I always imagine Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits whenever someone does that.
“Noone thinks I have a lovely daughter.” Yes, Mrs. Brown. Noone does.
it’s all just made up. you can see old writings without spacing. or punctuation. you can’t even define what’s really a word universally. people just decided what’s what and standardized it at one point just for some consistency. that doesn’t mean things won’t change; they most definitely will.
No body writes noone as one word because there’s a similar word written that way.
Ampersand is another good example. “&” was considered the last letter of the alphabet for a while. Schoolchildren would recite the alphabet and finish it with the phrase “and, per se and” (“and, meaning and”).
The words got mashed together over time and the word “ampersand” was born.
“Per se” means “in itself”, so it’s a shorter way of saying “also the word ‘and’ itself”.
I think spellings and punctuation are still valid. Mostly. Ignore variations between English and Americanese.
In not the Americans’ fault that the English decided to butcher their own language after the US kicked them out
The spelling differences are actually mostly due to Noah Webster standardising what he saw as pure Anglo-Saxon English without corruption by French princelings.
Hah, that makes sense.
England and all its former colonies (except the American ones) agree on the language, and the only odd one out - the United States feels it is unique among former colonies and its parent nation as the sole owner of the most correct version of English.
Seems likely /s
I know this is all a joke, but Canada doesn’t share the UK’s… proclivities with language
That has to do with the definition of what a word even is (an open problem!). “Alot” is clearly made up of two separate units, but so is “anyway”. I think a lot of people don’t like this one because it’s simply unnecessary. You need “anyway” to show that the two words are not stressed separately, but treated as one unit, whereas with “a lot” this is already obvious (“a” is almost never stressed).
Also has to do with English spelling just being bad, generally.Frankly this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for “another”
Which some who use “alot” consider as two words.
One thing I learned as an information technology engineer: language is a tool for communication. As long as the sender can send its message unobstructed and as long as the receiver receives and understands the message as intended, the information transmission can be considered a successs.
I dig the variety of topics on this comm, and I super appreciate how it doesn’t get STEMlordy at all.
It’s all connected. :)
End prescriptuhvist speling! We haf nuthing to loose butt hour wigly red underlyns!
Ow. What did I do to you?!
If you think that’s bad, never try reading FEERSUM ENDJINN.
This reads like it was written by an ork from Warhammer 40k
I prefer Excession. There’s no amount of minds talking or new names of minds that is too much for me.
undalihnz
That hurt to read… Kudos!
Would you look at the time? Loose butt hour.
That said I feel like when people are referring to whether or not something “is a word” they’re referring to whether not is has seen historical/widespread usage, not “has somebody ever just decided it meant something, somewhere, at some point”
most often it’s said to dismiss people. AAVE gets a lot of that. but it’s used to mock and dismiss young people too by the “back in my day” crew.
I know who AvE is; who’s AAVE?
African American Vernacular English… what’s AvE?
AvE is a YouTuber.
“a language that doesn’t adapt to an ever changing society is bound to be lost”, sure, but adapt too quickly and you lose the ability to communicate between groups of people.
There needs to be some compromise where new words are adopted, and changed words are accepted, without flooding the language with garbage. For example, English should still be taught in schools, and English teachers should still have the freedom of correcting the writing kids produce, and taking points off for “mistakes”.
Like, if you go pure descriptivist, “it’s” and “its” can now mean the same thing. There is no ability to distinguish between their, they’re and there. A business email describing a product as “cheugy, no cap” is perfectly acceptable and it’s up to the reader to figure it out, because every word is a real word and perfectly valid, and every grammar deviation is acceptable because languages evolve.
Even on social media, I think it’s fair to push back on “mistakes” that make it hard to understand something. An error that might take a poster 1 second to fix, might cost the world minutes, as thousands of people each take a few seconds to puzzle out what the OP meant to write.
Languages are about communication, and that can suffer whether the language police are too rigid and forbid any deviation, are too easily bribed and allow for anything.
Certain registers of a language do have different rules, but those also change and are still kinda whatever that part of society agrees with. Business letters that I learned to write in gradeschool in the '80s aren’t necessarily the same as I would write or expect to receive today. Ubiquitous, fast electronic communication also through a wrench into things a bit.
It’s too good to pass this up in this thread: threw*.
What, you don’t place a wrench in the middle of all your communications for safety? heh, I shouldn’t post whilst tired.
While that’s correct and all, it still irks me when somebody uses a word that has a shorter, older variant. (Gives side-eye to orientated)
orientated
Is this common in American English? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word oriented double handled like that. Irregardless, it slew me
At least with orientated it kind makes sense because orientation is the process of orienting, so to have done the process would be to be orientated in a weird way but irregardless will always irk me because the ir and the less make a double negative, making the meaning as written ‘with regard’ which just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Like if somebody misunderstood a sentence with a double negative we would call them wrong but because it’s a single word they get to change the entire language, regardless of its structure and rules? Seems kinda bogus to me.
You can double for intensification. Language isn’t maths, you cannot count negations to reach meaning.
I’m a native US English speaker. I would only ever say
oriented. As a kid, not knowing the “correct” form, I got corrected for sayingorientated. I watch content from a lot of countries and do hear at least some British English speakers usingorientated.Never seen it here.
“Orientated” is reasonably common in British English, I think. I remember thinking someone had misspelt it the first time I saw “oriented” written down.
Great post, I offer my most enthusiastic contrafribularities.
I agree, a perfectly crommulant statement from a Word Warrior.
I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
Once upon a time there was a lovely little sausage called Baldrick
Have you considered medial advice from a lingual artificer?
