Flame of the week?
Much too well constructed and lacking the raging, slavering uncontrollable USE of RANDOM capital letters and an excessive provision of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6/10 - See me.
Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?
Have you ever uttered the sound "erm" while speaking? More to the point, have you ever erm'd when answering politicians' questions during a scrutiny panel session? If you have, says one Reg reader, you are bastardising the English language. Oh yes. Turn your eyes, dear reader, to our writeup of the London Assembly's scrutiny …
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 09:46 GMT A K Stiles
You were doing so well...
" those with which I believe a one Alistair Dabbs dabbles (SWIDT?) with"
If only you had left off the last "with", you would have crafted a sentence of excellent structure. (Well, that and the errant "a" between "believe" and "one Alistair Dabbs" )
I have to agree though, FoTW can provide some wonderful entertainment.
[edited to remove the suggestion you still had time to edit your post as that time has now expired]
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 08:38 GMT msknight
Forsooth!
Aye! To olde English thee must be true. To live, and breathe, and grow? Not us. We must, in time, be stricken as if in stone. I wager we would all be the poor, should our language change and we lose the meaning of things. Describe the new fangled? Never! That which is unfamiliar, should stay as the devil on the shore; an un-named mist, for it is not of our own loins.
ie. Ask Norman where, in the time line of the English Language, he would prefer us to weigh anchor. And then poke fun at him for such a suggestion.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 12:13 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Forsooth!
Ask Norman where, in the time line of the English Language, he would prefer us to weigh anchor.
@msknight: I agree utterly with the sentiment of your post, but I'm bound to point out that to "weigh anchor" is to raise the anchor from the sea bed and, by implication, sail away. I think "drop anchor", or just "anchor" would make more sense in the context.
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Thursday 25th October 2018 00:19 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Forsooth!
I believe "thee" is correct as I was using it - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thee - but I'm not an expert.
MW says, correctly of course, that it's the objective form. You were using it as the subject. When I grew up in Yorkshire second person singular was still in current use by older gernerations so, give or take the dialect pronunciation, it's second nature.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 08:42 GMT ArrZarr
I, for one, am glad that Norman is undertaking efforts that put him in a similar light as the Académie française rather than putting his copious free time to use in some field that might hinder progress to have some stuck-up traditionalist clinging to the arbitrary rulebooks provided. He doesn't work in the public sector, does he?
In the case of our wondrous mongrel tounge, the rulebooks were generally dreamed up in the 18th and 19th centuries by prescriptivist linguists who appear to have had very little basis for most of the rules they created and whose main objective appears to have been getting the English language to be neat and tidy rather than the ability to express ideas and have conversations.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 09:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
"[...] whose main objective appears to have been getting the English language to be neat and tidy rather than the ability to express ideas and have conversations.
IIRC There was another tidy up much earlier. Someone decided that as there were the words "would" and "should" - then the perfectly correct "coud" should match them by changing to "could".
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 21:00 GMT swm
Re: Wittgenstein, eh?
When I was in college we had a professor whom we taped weekly for a radio show. His speech was littered with "ums", and "ah"s and if we had time we would edit these out of the tape (with real scissors!). Someone spliced all of these tape fragments together and it sounded like someone with something to say but couldn't get it out.
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 11:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Obvious answer to grammar nazi:
Old English might get us in trouble.
"Bird" meaning woman ( really "byrd", I believe ) is a Viking ( and therefore at some point in history, an English ) word.
I also believe Norman would moan at my northern use of 'ta', from the Danish (and therefore English) "tak".
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Wednesday 24th October 2018 18:58 GMT jake
Re: Obvious answer to grammar nazi:
The language of the Vikings was not Old English. It was Old Norse. The word for woman in ON is kvennalið.
The word for "woman" in OE is frōwe (see: germanic frau).
Both languages have other words and variations for the word woman depending on context. None of them are, or resemble, bird I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover them on your own.
My BigDic says that (paraphrasing to avoid the OED's predatory lawyers) ta is the baby-talk version of "thanks" because babies have issues with th and nks. First appeared in print in 1772. And so I learn something I never knew, despite being a Yank who uses the word daily. Ta, disgusted! This round's on me :-)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
