'The word pedants' top 10 | It's specific, not Pacific...' blog discussion.
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Oi, we're here moaning about British English. 90%* of the decimation is caused by you Yanks so swan off to your own board.
(Uhm, , btw)
*(Ha ha! Had to type '90%' because I could not remember off the top of my head whether it should be 'percent', 'per cent' or 'per-cent'. :rotfl:)More than £2000 in interest earned this year, directly attributable to advice from MSE0 -
One that has recently stunned me was the amount of people in our office who call a drawer a draw.0
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At our local gym a sign advises us to "Use the Turnstyles when leaving"More than £2000 in interest earned this year, directly attributable to advice from MSE0
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People think I'm petty with this one, but I can't stand it when people say 'p' instead of 'pence'. Especially on adverts!! I always shout 'PENCE' at the television!0
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dancingmel wrote: »As with the above this also bothers me and used on TV alot ' I don't want nothin (nufink)' when should be saying 'I dont want anything'
grammar-monster .com
The word alot does not exist in the English language.More than £2000 in interest earned this year, directly attributable to advice from MSE0 -
The double negative is my personal bugbear - especially when combined with bad use of languarge - "I ain't got no money" and so on.
Both my mother in law and my best friend persistantly use the wrong words for things - my friend will gladly be corrected and try to remember for next time, but the MIL refuses. All weekend I've had to put up with "mirrow" for "mirror" (and it's not an accent thing as both the FIL and my husband can mange it) along with lots of others. Aaargh!0 -
Their, there, they're.
Also using as or since instead of because.0 -
There is however a fine line between dismissing language change and development out of hand and between issues aournd clarity and understanding. So pacific & specific are quite clearly different words for different things, but the insertion of "like" (as in "It was like amazing") is just language variety and development. It's like people using a glottal stop (dropping the T in the middle or the end of words) - people complain about this perfectly natural aspect of urban English but will be furious if you tease them about the fact they say bath with a short "a" sound, say "coop" instead of "cup" and so on.
If you don't like variety and change in language then you have no right to ever complain about being teased for having a funny accent, or treated differently as a result. There is an assumption that at some point there was a perfect form of language and we are abusing it horribly. Actually no. Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson wrote in the 17th Century about how language was going to the dogs, the King James Bible was written in a form of English which even then was old and archaic, Shakespeare was somewhat creative with his spellings, and so on. If you take the "it was better in the old days" approach, then which old days are you referring to?
Word meanings twist and change, so literally could come (indeed partly has come) to mean something more like "really", Basically is becoming more of a discourse marker to show that the person is trying to summarise or be brief, and several languages manage perfectly well with only one word for both teach and learn, so why can't we?
I have a bugbear about possessive apostrophes, I have to admit, but try to restrain this because I know they may be useful at the moment but I am also open enough to accept that they may stop being useful.0 -
incidentally - double negatives - Since when have you you ever interpreted a double negative as a positive? If you heard me say "I didn't do nothing" you would never understand that as "I did something." So where's your problem?0
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