War on Grammar

The author of the piece misspelled disdain.

Bastardization of English
I gonna say that we nede roolz, man, roolz

I agree with you Rufio. As a staunch traditionalist when it comes to the English language, I hate the way that it is being bastardised by the majority of people. What makes it worse is how English grammar is so easy compared to, say, Russian or Greek, and yet they never continue to make simple mistakes. One example is how most people say done when did should be used, as in 'he done good' or 'I done my research, Mr. Ayrës.' Then, you have the people who say 'ain't' all the time, and use 'was' in all persons of the preterite of be. It is laziness. In fact, a few years back, a University asked me to do some research into the way people speak, and over 80% of people across the board made simple, simple grammatical errors. To me, wilfully speaking bad English is putting a dagger through the heart of the language, and it sounds like someone scraping their nails down a blackboard whenever someone does it. No one even knows basic rules, never mind use of the subjunctive.

Oh, by the way, does anyone know where 'I've got' in place of 'I have' came from? It is rather curious, as it makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm assumiing that "ironical" was a joke too. I think this piece was ripped from The Onion, which I love. Best political humour out there. Or should I say, it is the best political humour out there. Hmmm...

"I've got" wormed it's way into the English language through common usage, like so many other phrases, and is now generally accepted as interchangeable with "I have". "I have" is correct. I swear it's only a matter of time before Americans start spelling "ask" "aks".

Ironical is a word.

That's true, strangely enough. I thought it was a joke too, but no:



It is, however, an Americanized adaption.

Thanks for your help, cavfancier. Do people say 'aks' instead of 'ask'? I speak with Oxbridge's 'Received Pronunciation' with a bit of an accent on some words, and so I would use a long a like in father; 'àsk.' I was having a discussion with my friend, Philipa, a few days ago, and she believes that people should be able to write phonetically. I argued that this would be yet another dumbing-down of an often dumbed-down language. She would argue for this though, as she is an English teacher to fourteen-year-olds whose reading ages are often as low as six. This 'Phonetic English,' which they tried to feed Africans some while ago, has serious faults. For example, they would spell both like and lick as 'lik', which is both unsightly and gives no clue as to the length of the vowel. If that were to become the mode in which people write, I would persevere to write like this; simplified English gives no clue to eptymology either.

I wouldn't use ironical in a sentence, though I've heard people (other than Bush) use it, so I guess it's probably valid. There's a lot of overended -ical adjectives in English - historical, problematical, polemical, etc, all at different stages of acceptedness - not to mention all the -ical -ism's in sociology. Historical actually has a different political meaning than historic now, but the rest are the same as their -ic variants - just longer. I think it's the same thing where drug is now dragged, and snuck is becoming sneaked. Older past tenses and older adjectives are developing more Ameicanize endings. I think I read somewhere that the past tense of "preach" used to be "praught" like "teach" and "taught" but it changed.

Yes... we still say that here, although it's not standard: 'He praught to me as if he were my father. I think the 'simplification' of English is both vile and, in some cases, is making things harder. It ruins consistency.

I actually don't see a problem with it - that's how languages change naturally. But learning how to use language is important - whatever form the language takes. I remember seeing something written by Jonothan Swift about how deplorable it was that people weren't pronouncing all the past tenses "ehd" anymore and they were all shortened to "'d". We seem to have survived.

As you note historic and historical have different meanings. But this is the case for other words, like classical versus classic and many more.

Craven, I don't consider American adaptations of proper words English. "Ironical" is just a waste of two letters, IMO, but then again, unlike drom, I am a Nazi when it comes to these things. What's next, "drastic" morphs into "drastical?" That would make for amusing news broadcasts however: "Firefighters continue to fight the drastical forest fires ragingly wilding through California at the moment..."

I agree with you on this one, cav... and I'll use my purportedly pointless 'our' in colour until I die! Urgh I can imagine people saying 'writed' and 'buyed' in the future... yack.

Did you ever read about the students in English who tried to be given points in their GCSEs for writing in Text language? The irony was that the wrote this way in an English exam!

'2b r nt 2b, tht is th kwstyn.'

I can't understand it. Bring back Shakespearean English!

Oh by the way, on the subject of Shakespearean English, teachers in a school in... Minnesota, I think it was... decided to adopt Elizabethan English as their language of instruction. Students were taught the ins and outs of the language, and subsequently their grades in Modern Languages went up rapidly...

That's interesting drom. Forgive me, I just can't ever remember how to make accents on the computer. Rufio speaks from a linguist's perspective, which I understand. Language does indeed evolve around cultural influence and common useage of 'altered' terminolgoy. Whether or not I have to like it is another thing entirely. I think it would be fun to bring back Chaucerian English as standard, but that might be too daunting a task for today's supposed 'teachers'. I still stick by the premise that one needs to learn the fundamentals of a language first, before setting about changing it.

I did follow the Oakland 'Ebonics taught in schools' debate when it happened. This is an interesting link:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/12_01/ebintro.shtml

The articles are just on the right side there.

An expression which really irks me is "I could care less". When the expression "I couldn't care less" came into common usage several decades ago, it meant exactly what it said; your degree of caring was an absolute minimum and couldn't be decreased. Somewhere along the line the "couldn't" became "could"; however the expression implied the same thing. Go figure.

No, Cav, I don't care about the accents... I'm certainly not a haughty type, thank heavens, and I put my cards out on the table as far as what I think is concerned. I was surprised that a2k accepted them, as most sites don't.

I don't care too much for the disevolution of this language, centred around catering for the stupidest speaker rather than the most intelligent, as most things are today. (Did you ever see 'Confessions of a dangerous mind'? It's madness, how popular that the rubbish he made became.) Most things are allied to laziness, like textlanguage, or using 'done' everywhere. My detested half-brother does this all the time; it annoys me, and most things do not.

Chaucerian English? What a coincidence; I'm currently making 'The Miller's tale' into a play form for a friend, and starring in it too.... I think it would be great; it would force people to think about the language that they are using. I like inflections.

I must confess, I thought that ebonics sounded like a macrobiotic yoghurt before I read this article. Thanks for posting it; I was so interested, I did further research on it. What do you think about the whole question? If someone started talking to me in ebonics, I would have to say in the quintissentially 'Startled Middle-Class Englander' style; 'excuse me?' As if the other person were speaking ancient Greek. Over in England, white teenagers slaughter 'ebonics' à la Ali G... the supposedly black vernacular is turning into the language of teenagers trying to assert 'phatness.'

My niece speaks two versions of English well, in addition to a smattering of Spanish.

She has always had an ear for language; I remember holding her hand on walks when she was three and pointing to various plants, hearing her repeat, for example, "Pelargonium peltatum" with ease and enthusiasm.

She has a fair command of grammar, at least to the extent PBS television series use it, as those were the only tv programs she was allowed to watch at her father's house. To balance this, as it were, she has ribald mastery of street language, a mastery she acheived in years of Los Angeles public schools. In her case, it was a reasonable survival acquisition.

deleted as a double post