The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Wild Card => Topic started by: gloomba on August 27, 2007, 12:17:25 pm
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I'd like to talk about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in linguistics. This has been bugging me for a while.
See, my mom teaches high school English, and as such I was brought up with the idea that there was correct and incorrect grammar, and if you didn't know the difference, it was basically over for you (I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea). But when I took some linguistics classes in college, it seemed that that idea had fallen out of favor, and grammatical mistakes were considered a natural evolution of the language. That is, if enough people are making the same mistake, it becomes an idiom or something and an accepted part of the language.
I can understand that approach, and obviously languages do need to evolve with the times. My problem, I guess, is that in this form of evolution, there is no process of natural selection, no survival of the fittest. There are some mutations that don't make communication any easier or clearer, but are used by a lot of people just because they don't know any better. I'm talking about things like "could of," "irregardless," and "could care less." All of those are ungrammatical and/or just make no sense, and they all have syntactically valid alternatives that do make sense. So quite frankly there's no reason to use any of them. But enough people do that they'll probably end up recognized in dictionaries soon (if they're not already), and while you and I know that dictionaries are descriptive by nature, thousands of people will use them to justify their use of these ridiculous terms, and we'll no longer have a leg to stand on when complaining about them.
So my conflict is that I recognize the necessity and inevitability of a language to be constantly changing, but I don't think we should just blindly accept any change. I'd like to be all liberal artsy about it and say "ooh, isn't it interesting how 'could have' became 'could of,'" but considering that I do actually have to speak the language in question, I'd like it to be as clear and efficient as possible, and so I think a line has to be drawn somewhere. But that sounds awfully prescriptivist of me -- which in linguistic circles, I understand, is pretty much considered fascism. So I'd be losing a lot of humanitarian street cred.
Am I just a stodgy old fossil out of touch with the times?
Yours,
Troubled in Tallahassee
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Am I just a stodgy old fossil out of touch with the times?
Yes. Eventually you will die, and no one will remember when those usages were stigmatized. History proves this. In fact, many words and usages that you consider standard fall into that same category and you don't even know it.
P.S. You haven't read all the board archives, have you?
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Yes. Eventually you will die, and no one will remember when those usages were stigmatized. History proves this. In fact, many words and usages that you consider standard fall into that same category and you don't even know it.
P.S. You haven't read all the board archives, have you?
No. I apologize for not reading all 99,700 posts in advance.
I do realize that many words and usages fall into that category. There are certainly plenty of things in English that don't make any sense. Sure, they're considered standard now, but again, that's not necessarily due to merit. If people hadn't put up with them at the time, maybe we would have had better alternatives, and the current form of the language wouldn't be the huge mess that it is, with hundreds of exceptions to annoy people trying to learn it.
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Wombat was not trying to be a dick to a stranger goomba This is a subject we visit often. (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,1927.0.html)
And one I could care less about, in the most accurate interpretation of the term.
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This is a subject we visit often. (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,1927.0.html)
Lord knows, don't we. I suppose this is an inevitable result of being a group of imaginary people with slightly higher intelligence than usual.
Because I am retired from this subject and am tired of the damned flashbacks, I am really going to try not to read this thread, so y'all behave yourselves and try not to need moderation, OK? You know how bloody these grammar discussions can get.
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Wombat was not trying to be a dick to a stranger goomba This is a subject we visit often. (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,1927.0.html)
Please pardon my faux pas. Still, I like to think that my post addresses the heart of the matter a little more directly.
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See, my mom teaches high school English, and as such I was brought up with the idea that there was correct and incorrect grammar, and if you didn't know the difference, it was basically over for you (I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea). But when I took some linguistics classes in college, it seemed that that idea had fallen out of favor, and grammatical mistakes were considered a natural evolution of the language. That is, if enough people are making the same mistake, it becomes an idiom or something and an accepted part of the language.
Like dictionaries, linguists describe, not prescribe. High school English teachers, on the other hand, prescribe. This is the natural order of things.
I can understand that approach, and obviously languages do need to evolve with the times. My problem, I guess, is that in this form of evolution, there is no process of natural selection, no survival of the fittest.
There actually are observed laws governing language change, but they generally tend to cover phonological drift, not syntactic or semantic drift such as you seem to be decrying, since phonological drift tends to occur in a consistent manner. For example: Grimm's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law), Verner's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law), and the Germanic spirant law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_spirant_law).
So my conflict is that I recognize the necessity and inevitability of a language to be constantly changing, but I don't think we should just blindly accept any change.
But where do you draw the line? After all, both you and your English-teacher mom probably use forms that would have been considered incorrect at some point in the past. Should we be speaking English as it was spoken a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Should we perhaps be speaking Shakespeare's, or Chaucer's English?
Am I just a stodgy old fossil out of touch with the times?
This possibility cannot be ruled out.
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Plus the people doing the deciding can't even be consistent. They spend 12 years teaching kids MLA, but in my experience in the real world everybody wants AP or Chicago. In one "whom" is always optional, in another "townhouse" has to be two words, and last I checked all of them still insist on capitalizing "internet" for reasons that nobody has ever been able to adequately explain.
Who can keep this straight?
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Well, I'm not advocating a sweeping reform of the language or anything. I do generally favor a descriptivist attitude; there are just certain phrases that drive me crazy. But how can I tolerate some non-standard syntax and not others? That is my conflict.
P.S. Yeah, capitalizing "internet" is ridiculous.
AP style blows. I
majored in journalism.
Fuck AP style, man.
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P.S. You haven't read all the board archives, have you?
This is optional now? I thought people couldn't join until they read them all and passed that 500 question test. Did Jough retire that?
I don't think I'm going to follow this thread, either. It's like freshman college philosophy. It's really, really interesting, unless it isn't.
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I withdraw the question!
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Oh no! You don't get off that easy! I haven't even gotten to my allusion of linguistics to circle-jerking.
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Skub! Skuuuuuuuuub!
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but, but...
linguistics is awesome though....
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Skub! Skuuuuuuuuub!
You're pro Skub? And to think I used to respect you.
Anti-Skub 4 Life, bitches.
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My wife and I have this argument all the time. I believe in the evolution of the language, she thinks it's either Good English or Bad English. She feels that seeing the language as a fluid thing allows stupid people to keep doing their thing without getting corrected.
Really, all I want is the reintroduction of the letter thorn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29) to the alphabet. Þink of þe efficiency þat þis would provide!
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My wife and I have this argument all the time. I believe in the evolution of the language, she thinks it's either Good English or Bad English. She feels that seeing the language as a fluid thing allows stupid people to keep doing their thing without getting corrected.
This is why my wife (when she was a classroom teacher) wouldn't let me help grade her students' papers. I don't care if its Health, Biology, or (God forbid) Anatomy and Physiology - if you can't construct a properly spelled, coherent thought, you're not getting full marks, damnit!
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This is why my wife (when she was a classroom teacher) wouldn't let me help grade her students' papers. I don't care if its Health, Biology, or (God forbid) Anatomy and Physiology - if you can't construct a properly spelled, coherent thought, you're not getting full marks, damnit!
-1 pt.
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This is why my wife (when she was a classroom teacher) wouldn't let me help grade her students' papers. I don't care if its Health, Biology, or (God forbid) Anatomy and Physiology - if you can't construct a properly spelled, coherent thought, you're not getting full marks, damnit!
-1 pt.
Damn! I
(http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s52/glennsche/fail.jpg)
Hoist by my own petard.
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Picture's worth a can, though.
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There is definitely Good english and Bad english but I'll only be an asshole about it when it's in writing, I think conversation can be allowed more leeway.
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This is why my wife (when she was a classroom teacher) wouldn't let me help grade her students' papers. I don't care if its Health, Biology, or (God forbid) Anatomy and Physiology - if you can't construct a properly spelled, coherent thought, you're not getting full marks, damnit!
See, this is a totally different thing. Of course there are rules for good writing, which is a more formal use of language. But this isn't really relevant to the original question, and the one of the reasons these discussions never make sense is that people don't distinguish rules of good writing from the natural use of language. Writing is different for many reasons - you need to make up for the lack of stuff you have in face to face interaction like intonation, body language, and the chance to ask for clarification. And you can also argue that following the rules of writing has a social purpose of demonstrating that you're the kind of person who's educated enough to know the rules.
You can't apply the rules for writing to normal speech. Speaking the way you write a class essay would just make you sound like a space alien who'd learned English without ever hearing it. Whether 'internet' should be capitalized is totally unrelated to whether we can through sheer force of will stop people from saying 'could of.'
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See, this is a totally different thing. Of course there are rules for good writing, which is a more formal use of language. But this isn't really relevant to the original question, and the one of the reasons these discussions never make sense is that people don't distinguish rules of good writing from the natural use of language. Writing is different for many reasons - you need to make up for the lack of stuff you have in face to face interaction like intonation, body language, and the chance to ask for clarification. And you can also argue that following the rules of writing has a social purpose of demonstrating that you're the kind of person who's educated enough to know the rules.
You can't apply the rules for writing to normal speech. Speaking the way you write a class essay would just make you sound like a space alien who'd learned English without ever hearing it. Whether 'internet' should be capitalized is totally unrelated to whether we can through sheer force of will stop people from saying 'could of.'
Is... is "could've" OK? Am I bad person for saying/writing it?
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þat þis
All I see is bat piss.
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There is definitely Good english and Bad english but I'll only be an asshole about it when it's in writing, I think conversation can be allowed more leeway.
Oh, there's Bad English (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTPZeo3Lps), alright. And I'll be an asshole about it anytime.
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This is why my wife (when she was a classroom teacher) wouldn't let me help grade her students' papers. I don't care if its Health, Biology, or (God forbid) Anatomy and Physiology - if you can't construct a properly spelled, coherent thought, you're not getting full marks, damnit!
My sister's students (my wife is a teacher, my sister is a teacher, my best friend from high school is a teacher, and I'm a teacher for a company instead of a school) complain because she teaches them more English than their English teachers do. She is a biology teacher, and has no problem marking someone way way way down if their paper reads of ass.
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bumpin this oldschool thread for this site over yonder (http://begthequestion.info/)
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Ok, I've always stayed out of the descriptivism vs prescriptivism or whatever debates on this board because I really don't understand it and don't care enough about it to learn, but I guess I am not a descriptivist if that post is an example of descriptivism.
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"Prescriptivist" means you believe that there is an "officially correct" version of the English language. The job of a dictionary writer or grammarian is to codify or "prescribe" the official rules of the language.
A "Descriptivist" does not think there is any such thing as a officially correct version of a language. A descriptivist observes how people actually use language and documents or "describes" the rules -- which are flexible and always changing.
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and therefore Paul, the link in Choop's post is not an example of descriptivism, but its opposite. Also, of a person who needs to get a life or at least a more interesting idea of what to make a website about, even if they do claim their tongues are partly in cheek. OK, website person, you know more than other people. Now go take some pictures of pugs or something and get back to me.
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Ok, I read it wrong, that guy was being a prescriptivist douchebag.
But still I'm not sure how to use BTQ properly. Should you use it to point out a logical fallacy like the example given - "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly?"
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Ok, I read it wrong, that guy was being a prescriptivist douchebag.
But still I'm not sure how to use BTQ properly. Should you use it to point out a logical fallacy like the example given - "I think he is unattractive because he is ugly?"
Yes. That is the original definition of BTQ.
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In my opinion this has become a phrase it's better to not use at all. If you use it in the original meaning most people won't understand what you are saying, and what this sort of originalist-prescriptivist always seems to lose sight of is that there is no point in talking if people don't understand what you are saying. On the other hand if you use it the way most people use it nowadays you run the risk of being irritated by someone showing off how superior he is by pointing out that you have used it wrong.
There is only one rule that really counts in these things, which is that telling people they are speaking incorrectly is being a dick to a stranger.
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i agree wombat, and i stopped using the phrase a long while ago. i also abandoned "hopefully" because it doesn't mean what everybody seems to think it means.
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I like Merriam-Webster's little rants on topics like this. Here's Hopefully: usage In the 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which dates to the early 18th century and had been in fairly widespread use since at least the 1930s, underwent a surge in popularity. A surge of criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard.
Nauseous's rant is pretty good, too.
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being a dick to a stranger.
I believe the phrase you are looking for is being a cock to a stranger (http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuabz9GRp).
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Essentially, all of these rules are markers of class. They allow people to distinguish "us" and "them," in this case, those of us who are educated enough to have learned a set of arbitrary, irrational rules, and those who aren't. It's just like knowing which fork to use despite the fact that any of the forks will convey food to your mouth equally well. So the more nonsensical they are, the better, because that way there's little chance that the "thems" will follow them by accident or naturally.
People have used language to hate on each other throughout recorded history, back to the people in the Bible who were killed when they couldn't pronounce 'shibboleth" correctly. Every society needs ways to decide who isn't allowed to marry their daughters. That's all there is to it.
Also: ten thousand cans to Gimpson if only in my dreams.
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I believe the phrase you are looking for is being a cock to a stranger (http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuabz9GRp).
That little sequence so closely captures the feeling of being high on mj that I get a little flashback everytime I read it. Trippy.
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Well, *some* degree of uniformization is needed to avoid that every conversation becomes a conversation about what the conversation means.
I think a useful distinction would be between rules that concern language on a functional level (that cannot be changed without causing confusion), and rules about appropriateness of usage (that cannot be changed without making the utterer look bad under a set of social/intellectual/etc scales).
I'm a little bit prescriptivist, as you can gather ("what do you mean 'a little bit'?" "YOU FIGURE IT OUT EINSTEN!")
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Essentially, all of these rules are markers of class. They allow people to distinguish "us" and "them," in this case, those of us who are educated enough to have learned a set of arbitrary, irrational rules, and those who aren't. It's just like knowing which fork to use despite the fact that any of the forks will convey food to your mouth equally well. So the more nonsensical they are, the better, because that way there's little chance that the "thems" will follow them by accident or naturally.
People have used language to hate on each other throughout recorded history, back to the people in the Bible who were killed when they couldn't pronounce 'shibboleth" correctly. Every society needs ways to decide who isn't allowed to marry their daughters. That's all there is to it.
I agree that this is an use of prescriptivism, but it's not the only justification for paying attention to language rules. In my job precision in language can be vital. Having an well-defined lexicon and grammar can be very important if you're drafting a statute or a contract. That doesn't have anything to do with classism.
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I believe the phrase you are looking for is being a cock to a stranger (http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuabz9GRp).
That's also the source of the Proper Attyre for Footballe (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,5048.0.html). Sign up, y'all. We need about 3 more playres.
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I tried to read this thread, and my brain wouldn't let me. My visual field went black, and my stomach regurgitated the toxins.
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I agree that this is an use of prescriptivism, but it's not the only justification for paying attention to language rules. In my job precision in language can be vital. Having an well-defined lexicon and grammar can be very important if you're drafting a statute or a contract. That doesn't have anything to do with classism.
Sure, but none of the rules that people make dick-to-a-stranger websites about have anything to do with clarity and precision. You could follow every single one of them to the letter and it would do nothing to make your writing more understandable to the reader. No one was ever confused about the meaning of a sentence because of a split infinitive, for example. In fact some of the rules might actually make it harder for you to communicate, like if you insisted on using a phrase like 'beg the question' in a sense that's increasingly becoming archaic.
A lot of the rules specifically for writing as opposed to spoken English make the point even more clearly. I want to poke myself in the eye with a stick when I see that someone has used "it's" as the possessive, but I can't pretend I don't know exactly what they mean in the context of the sentence. And plenty of shit is written with perfect punctuation.
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I tried to read this thread, and my brain wouldn't let me. My visual field went black, and my stomach regurgitated the toxins.
I know. I swear, I want with every thread of being to lock it, but I play a wimp on the Internet so I can't do it.
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Sure, but none of the rules that people make dick-to-a-stranger websites about have anything to do with clarity and precision. You could follow every single one of them to the letter and it would do nothing to make your writing more understandable to the reader. No one was ever confused about the meaning of a sentence because of a split infinitive, for example. In fact some of the rules might actually make it harder for you to communicate, like if you insisted on using a phrase like 'beg the question' in a sense that's increasingly becoming archaic.
A lot of the rules specifically for writing as opposed to spoken English make the point even more clearly. I want to poke myself in the eye with a stick when I see that someone has used "it's" as the possessive, but I can't pretend I don't know exactly what they mean in the context of the sentence. And plenty of shit is written with perfect punctuation.
Agreed. 100% Agreed.
I think another motivation is traditionalism. The "received forms" of language that these rules teach is what we heard growing up spoken and written by people we respect (or were told to respect). Historical figures spoke this way, so it must it must be right.
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No one was ever confused about the meaning of a sentence because of a split infinitive, for example.
But the rule about split infinitives is a made-up one that never had anything to do with proper English grammar to begin with, and so seeing it invoked leads to one of the more rarefied of pleasures: calling someone out for being a prescriptivist incorrectly.
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game, set, match: ms. waterfield
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I'd like to talk about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in linguistics. This has been bugging me for a while.
See, my mom teaches high school English, and as such I was brought up with the idea that there was correct and incorrect grammar, and if you didn't know the difference, it was basically over for you (I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea). But when I took some linguistics classes in college, it seemed that that idea had fallen out of favor, and grammatical mistakes were considered a natural evolution of the language. That is, if enough people are making the same mistake, it becomes an idiom or something and an accepted part of the language.
I can understand that approach, and obviously languages do need to evolve with the times. My problem, I guess, is that in this form of evolution, there is no process of natural selection, no survival of the fittest. There are some mutations that don't make communication any easier or clearer, but are used by a lot of people just because they don't know any better. I'm talking about things like "could of," "irregardless," and "could care less." All of those are ungrammatical and/or just make no sense, and they all have syntactically valid alternatives that do make sense. So quite frankly there's no reason to use any of them. But enough people do that they'll probably end up recognized in dictionaries soon (if they're not already), and while you and I know that dictionaries are descriptive by nature, thousands of people will use them to justify their use of these ridiculous terms, and we'll no longer have a leg to stand on when complaining about them.
So my conflict is that I recognize the necessity and inevitability of a language to be constantly changing, but I don't think we should just blindly accept any change. I'd like to be all liberal artsy about it and say "ooh, isn't it interesting how 'could have' became 'could of,'" but considering that I do actually have to speak the language in question, I'd like it to be as clear and efficient as possible, and so I think a line has to be drawn somewhere. But that sounds awfully prescriptivist of me -- which in linguistic circles, I understand, is pretty much considered fascism. So I'd be losing a lot of humanitarian street cred.
Am I just a stodgy old fossil out of touch with the times?
Yours,
Troubled in Tallahassee
There are successful and unsuccessful attempts to "clean up" and standardize a language. Unsuccessful attempts are godawful - witness Young Avestan.* Successful attempts often have strange side effects -- Panini's grammar of Classical Sanskrit, for example, is a wonderfully cleaned up and standardized version of Old Indic (the Vedic stuff is more on par with Gathic Avestan); but even then, there are unintented consequences: certain things like the rigorous use of the instrumental + perfect for past tense actions (i.e. instead of saying "Gloomba hugged Wombat," I'd say "by Gloomba Wombat was hugged") lead to split ergativity in modern Hindi and Punjabi (where, in lieu of an instrumental case, it looks like the verb agrees with the object and not the subject)
* no, really, Young Avestan is garbage
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And how about that Klingon? That is some weird syntax right there, buddy.
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And how about that Klingon? That is some weird syntax right there, buddy.
Kidding aside, intentionally so. They took peculiarities from a variety of languages, mostly non-Indo-European, and crammed them together to create something that has a truly alien feel. The way cases are handled and the way agents are fronted is pretty strange.
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Kidding aside, intentionally so. They took peculiarities from a variety of languages, mostly non-Indo-European, and crammed them together to create something that has a truly alien feel. The way cases are handled and the way agents are fronted is pretty strange.
Yeah. I'd heard that. And until ST 6 there was no verb to be. They had to add one when a character quoted Hamlet.
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Yeah. I'd heard that. And until ST 6 there was no verb to be. They had to add one when a character quoted Hamlet.
With highly inflected languages, you don't really need the verb "to be". Most indo-european languages had two verbs "to be", one that usually was some variant of as/ah/is and one that was some variant of bu/bau/bav/bhu. The former tended to have more of an existential sense and the latter more of a sense of "becoming," but they were interchangeable. Yet, in almost all of the descendent languages, they were merged: hence English is/be, German ist/bin, Farsi hast/bud (vis. archaic bovad), and so forth. And moreover, in the earlier languages (Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian, Gothic, etc.) they were barely used at all: there is no need to when attributes (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) agree with their substantives (nouns, etc.)
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Ok, now I remember why I stay away from this thread. It's making my head hurt. Since Wombat won't lock the thread can I appeal to you all to please shut the fuck up!
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But the rule about split infinitives is a made-up one that never had anything to do with proper English grammar to begin with, and so seeing it invoked leads to one of the more rarefied of pleasures: calling someone out for being a prescriptivist incorrectly.
Nearly all of the classic prescriptive shibboleths have that property. You can write a whole website like that for one rule, too. Here's a good one.
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html (http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html)
Hey Paul, last I checked, you're a mod too....
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The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
Ailurophile A cat-lover.
Assemblage A gathering.
Becoming Attractive.
Beleaguer To exhaust with attacks.
Brood To think alone.
Bucolic In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant Like a cat’s eye.
Comely Attractive.
Conflate To blend together.
Cynosure A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance A brief love affair.
Demesne Dominion, territory.
Demure Shy and reserved.
Denouement The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude Disuse.
Desultory Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous Filmy.
Dissemble Deceive.
Dulcet Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent Bubbly.
Efflorescence Flowering, blooming.
Elision Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir A good potion.
Eloquence Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient A softener.
Ephemeral Short-lived.
Epiphany A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile At one time, for a time.
Ethereal Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative Suggestive.
Fetching Pretty.
Felicity Pleasantness.
Forbearance Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious Fleeting.
Furtive Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour Beauty.
Gossamer The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk
Halcyon Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue To infuse, instill.
Incipient Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue A naïve young woman.
Inglenook A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance Blithe nonchalance.
Inure To become jaded.
Labyrinthine Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe A special kind of gift.
Lagoon A small gulf or inlet.
Languor Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure Free time.
Lilt To move musically or lively.
Lissome Slender and graceful.
Lithe Slender and flexible.
Love Deep affection.
Mellifluous Sweet sounding.
Moiety One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen A slip of the ear.
Murmurous Murmuring.
Nemesis An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea A solution for all problems
Panoply A complete set.
Pastiche An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra A half-shadow.
Petrichor The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora A large quantity.
Propinquity An inclination.
Pyrrhic Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential Mose essential.
Ratatouille A spicy French stew.
Ravel To knit or unknit.
Redolent Fragrant.
Riparian By the bank of a stream.
Ripple A very small wave.
Scintilla A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal Eternal.
Seraglio Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna A river in Pennsylvania.
Sussurous Whispering, hissing.
Talisman A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation Tinkling.
Umbrella Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial In trace amounts.
Wafture Waving.
Wherewithal The means.
Woebegone Sorrowful, downcast.
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Hey Paul, last I checked, you're a mod too....
Yes, but not of this fora. Although, Bozack hasn't been around in several years so maybe I could take his place.
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I've got locking privileges on all the fora, not just the ones I'm listed as modding. Just sayin'.
Also, any list of beautiful words that does not include 'obelisk' and 'wombat' is bullshit.
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That list contained entirely too many French descended words. I expect some rigour from those efforts. Pretty French words are gimme's.
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Also, with Quentin Tarantino's new film coming out, I'm expecting to see plummeting levels of correct spellings of "Bastard" in society at large. I should probably look at upping the dose for my OCD meds.
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Also, with Quentin Tarantino's new film coming out, I'm expecting to see plummeting levels of correct spellings of "Bastard" in society at large. I should probably look at upping the dose for my OCD meds.
Yeah, I thought of that too. But you can't blame people if they're going to be screwed with like that. You learn what correct spelling is from what you read in sources that have been proofread by a bunch of people before you read it. If you can't trust movie titles, what can you trust?
Don't get me started on spelling. I have been dealing with a PR person this week who sent me emails with TWO names spelled wrong. I only just caught the second one at the last minute, because the last thing I do on a story, after checking the spelling several times, is copy and paste all the names into Google and get suspicious if I don't get any hints.
Seriously, people, do NOT go into PR if you don't understand that newspaper stories need to spell names correctly. It's not a field where that is a trivial detail.
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Also, with Quentin Tarantino's new film coming out, I'm expecting to see plummeting levels of correct spellings of "Bastard" in society at large. I should probably look at upping the dose for my OCD meds.
I've been seeing the opposite problem . I have yet to see one of my FB friends spell it with an e and some of them have been talking about it for weeks.
Also, bungalow is a fun word to say.
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Why is it spelled wrong, anyway? Is it because of its cussy nature? Is America really that uptight?
Or is it some other reason?
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Why is it spelled wrong, anyway? Is it because of its cussy nature? Is America really that uptight?
Or is it some other reason?
Maybe it's explained in the movie but here's what Wikipedia has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglourious_Basterds#Spelling
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I saw the trailer for that film last week. My first thoughts were something like this (http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF209-Now_Showing.jpg)
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Hey Paul, last I checked, you're a mod too....
Yeah, but once I modded outside my fora and I was told to back the fuck off.
For the record though, I wasn't serious about locking the thread. Besides it's finally started to wander thank god.
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What, you guys don't want to hear about ablaut, umlaut, and auslaut? Sheesh, people!
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Those were the viziers to the Three Kings, weren't they?
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no wonder today i'm gonna has been going on so long
i nominate all the current mods for global mod powers
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my prof. at Berkeley wrote "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language," and has devoted his life to screaming at prescriptivists and showing them how stupid they are for thinking they have the right to tell people how to talk.
He was pretty awesome.
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and has devoted his life to screaming at prescriptivists and showing them how stupid they are for thinking they have the right to tell people how to talk.
And a fat lot of good it's done, have you noticed?
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yeah. I did notice that.
Well, at least, he showed us a lot of good examples to bring up when people try to prescribe. "Shakespeare split infinities." "Chaucer used "they" for neuter singular"
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"Chaucer used "they" for neuter singular"
We talked about this.
Nearly all of the classic prescriptive shibboleths have that property. You can write a whole website like that for one rule, too. Here's a good one.
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html (http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html)
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So what's everybody preferred breast size? What about your feelings on manscaping? What kind of dog is Ray?
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i prefer the size of breast that my hand would be currently manipulating(were that the case). i have no one elses comfort to consider, when it comes to my no-no area, so lack of manscaping suits me fine. if there were a woman in my life whos face i would want to be considerate of, i would trim, but not shave, or wax. ray is a welsh corgi/pitbull mix.
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*else's
*whose
*not prescriptive-ist
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All I know is... I'm generally psychotic about spelling but am all about sacrificing grammar/sentence structure if the sacrifice allows for a better approximation of natural speech.
I don't know what that "ist" or "ism" is, though I'm fairly sure it has something to do with watching the early Linklater movies too often.
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but those are the good ones
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Dammit, today's Dino Comics made me start thinking about this thread again. http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1537
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a better approximation of natural speech.
= descriptivist.
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i prefer the size of breast that my hand would be currently manipulating(were that the case).
Right. I used to think I had a preference when it comes to hair color, but now it's whatever color is bobbing up and down on my crotch (were that the case).