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 …
Nope. How about "if you often need to lay down a bit to rest while thinking, at least get used to not polluting the airwaves while you do. It's an exceedingly poorly veiled attempt to pretend that you're still talking and to prevent anyone else actually capable of thinking and talking at the same time to do so in your miserably pathetic stead)".
"The spelling "erm" suggests to me that the R is not pronounced, [...]"
In my English background "erm" has the R pronounced. It lengthens the sound and usually suggests some cogitation on the part of the speaker before they make a statement. The "um" and "hem" are short sounds that do not give the same impression of a deep or lateral thought.
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As a foreign speaker of English I immediately wondered if the esteemed writer should not have put the "you know" in quotes to identify it as such, you know? It's that customary in Good English?
I must admit I have never heard any mode of English referred to as "Good" - I've heard "The Queen's English" which I assume is the mouth-full-of-potato variant, or "BBC English" which is the well enunciated variant you can hear on BBC if they're not trying to be regional.
Thanks for the laugh, and it's only Wednesday. I'm still grinning :).
old Japanese man ranting about the national public broadcaster (NHK, like BBC) over loan-words entering the language. I did read an article pointing out some good arguments, such as that many of the "native" words he suggested are in fact imports from China, but I can't find it again.
The correct usage is "em".
"Erm" is used by people with the RP speech problem. Even HM the Queen has largely got over that one. I think it was most widespread in the remote south east of the country - perhaps south of Cambridge and west of Oxford.
If you hear someone saying erm, see if you can notice other mispronunciations. My favourite is their habit of making so many of their vowels the same as in "her".
" I think it was most widespread in the remote south east of the country - [...]"
Standard pronunciation of "erm" in my northern working class childhood. The R lengthens the sound to indicate the speaker is cogitating before making a chosen statement about something.
Our 1960s secondary school English teacher had two language triggers. A kindness on his part was in trying to eradicate our local pronunciation of short vowels and some overstressed endings.
His real hatred was reserved for Americanisms. You learned to duck if one of the latter inadvertently escaped your lips. Even at a reunion 45 years later - old boys were careful to say "round" rather than "around".
Perhaps Mr. Clark had in mind Philosophical Investigations, no. 464:
"My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense."
Now, I should not have thought that El Reg needed any help at all with patent nonsense; but Mr. Clark may have some right to consider himself as better at it.
"Nothing particularly ungrammatical about that sentence."
Sentence fragment? Perhaps. I disagree, however; there is an implied "There is" in front, which you've merely left off as redundant. Of course, I just did the same thing.
I'm not actually an expert, so I reserve the right to be wrong.
Meantime, I believe your flamelord's example of "you know" should properly been put in quotes, like I did here.
Had a manager who would pad their sentences with "obviously", with the implication that if you didnt understand or agree with what they were saying - you - were stupid. As they were high up in the food chain the habit pervaded the supervisory class.
It's just a fancier way of saying "ya know..", and like all forms of baseless endorsement and excessive reinforcement, it makes me doubt they actually know what they are talking about.
A flame of a week has random capitalization, plenty of expletives or shift-key substitutes, and makes it difficult to tell if it was written by a sentient being or something that wouldn't even pass for AI to whoever created the AManFromMars1 AI.
A good flame leaves you imagining the thick pool of saliva that must have been left on the sender's keyboard after "submit" was clicked.
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