Words I am already sick of

I disagree, FBM.
Do u have evidence of this ?

lol I kno ur j/k...

I'm with David (you have no idea how much of a surprise this is for me!)

Happy holidays.....blech!

I understood everything except the: "j/k".
Explain ?

just kidding

I 'd very much prefer that thay say nothing at all, if thay choose not to recognize Christmas.
That is what I do, as to any holidays in which I have no interest.

When thay say "happy holidays" it feels like
they are stabbing us in the back and twisting the knife in perverted glee.





David

I believe that a language can endure
in a stable condition (adding new words, as necessary, e.g. for discoveries)
indefinitely into the future; I don 't see any problem.





David

I wouldn't deny the possibility, but do you know any that have? I'm trying to think of one living language that hasn't added anything but those neologisms deemed practically necessary. I don't know for a fact that no such language exists, but off the top of my head, I can't think of one.

I think this is because languages develop according to the will - conscious or otherwise - of innumerable common people; they're not decided upon by a handful of scholars or rulers.

If this weren't the case, we'd be speaking and writing something vastly different from the English we're using right now. I have a helluva time figuring out what Shakespeare's characters were saying, much less the Canterbury Tales. Much beyond that, I'm completely lost.

Latin comes to mind as a dead language. Sure it's used for diseases, plants and law terms, but we the common folk don't have much use for it.

David says:

Paranoia much?
That's purely in YOUR mind, David. And others of your ilk. It's not in the speaker's mind.

Languages DO change. If they're spoken, they change. Always have, always will. Otherwise we'd still be speaking proto-Indo-European, or some old Saxon dialect. Printing has slowed things down, but it still goes on. Think of the Great Vowel Shift, when all the English vowels changed their pronunciation (round about Shakespeare's time). Think about Shakespeare's vocabulary for that matter, which someone up above rightly points out is quite often hard for us to figure out. Think about upper-class Brit, which one would think would be almost immutable, currently morphing into Thamesside. Listen to old 78 records from the turn of the last century--Americans just don't talk like that any more--any of us. For that matter, think of OmSigDavid and his loopy crusade to convince us that we should spell "should" as "shud" because he's convinced it's "phonetic"(hint: no, it's not). Think of words that a century ago were condemned as barbarous slang ruining the language--like jamboree, flunk, pub, wallop, awfully (in the sense of "very"), and bogus--according to the language column in the Sunday Boston Globe, reviewing a reprint of the century-old Century Dictionary. For that matter, I was walking down the street in Boston yesterday, and a guy on a cellphone (a "mobile" in Australia, another change right there) coming the other way, concluded his conversation as we passed each other with, "OK, gracias, ciao"--which I regarded as a kind of tour-de-force--three words in three different languages,which probably just about everyone in America today would understand--tho David would probably absolutely despise the multiculturalism involved and be sure it was ruining the country.

You have it just the other way around from reality... Language is just a form, and like form relationship like government and economy it can evolve to lose meaning, and that is when it begins to die.... When people call hate love, or call freedom slavery, when they call our form of government democracy they so inevitably muddy the meaning of our words that their ability to convey a sense of truth clearly is ruined....

Communication is truth, and we do not have truth only to tell that the roses are blue, but to tell something essential to ourselves, to say how we are feeling with our lives so others can help us with our problems... The fact that so many resort to violence in this society demonstrates the inability of people to communicate their pain... If they destroy the environment, and their lives are so neurotic that they cannot consider the consequences of their actions, and no one can communicate to them their concerns, and no one can talk government into a reconsideration of its principals which are trash, then the language has failed all of us... We are left with acting out of our love or pain because the language like the currency has become debased with words of lead that fall flat, or so inflated with cant that no one hears them, like static on a radio... Only we can make it real... Only we can make it mean by meaning what we say, and by thinking of what we want to say, what we need to say to push society toward a form of relationship that actually feeds our needs...

We have suffered the subversion of language by the religious, by the immoral, and by the powerful... We have seen language used as medium of subculture, as a source of unity for minorities or youth... But as essential as language is for unity and defense of subcultures against the failing and miscommunication common to all failing societies it is not our goal... Our goal of national unity, and international unity can be served or diserved by out use of language or the common mis-use of language to lie, to miscommunicate, to defraud people of their rights.... If you listen to some one in the business of business, religion, or government and know every word is a lie; then you should know you are being injured even if not directly so... Every single lie that is told destroys the trust essential to the relationship....

When we cannot believe each other, when we cannot trust anyone because the big lie has become so common our defense is destroyed... Defense is a purpose of our government that the government has set about the destruction of.... We say justice to justify injustice and wonder why people take the law into their own hands... Its crazy... We see before us in the tongue and in every other form of relationship our failures to express our most basic needs, and have them satisfied as of a matter of courtesy.... There is no courtesy, no amity, no love to express.... With every lie we tell our hostility and animosity and self loathing...

No. Paranoia is not defined as fear of aliens gloating.

Wow. Sorry, and no intent to offend, but that's quite a salad of false analogies you got going there, man.

The designation of English (or practically every other living language) as a singular entity is false from the basic premise. How many French, German, Japanese, Spanish, etc loan words comprise "English"?

Furthermore, since we're talking about English, are actually we using the same language as Chaucer and Shakespeare? Are British, American, Australian and others who are native English speakers actually using the same language, as defined by the 'singular and immutable corpus' proposition?

Remember the words of the thief to Jesus in the famous Bob Dylon song: But you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate; So let us not speak falsely now, the hour is growing late...

Jesus too, philosopher that he was, was dealing with a failing form, looking for a new relationship with God and with humanity.... He too dealt with the misuse of the form of language to cover, really to disquise, the failure of larger relationships for which the poor and the hopeless were made to suffer as though guilty of, when they were its greatest victims...

Oh.






OK.

So this thread has quickly degenerated into the truly ******* bizarre, huh?

Iconic . . . i just want to scream when i hear it. This year, i have heard someone's first movie and someone else's first album described as iconic. Hello ? ! ? ! ? Do the people using this word have any ******* clue what it means ? ! ? ! ?

It's been beaten into to meaninglessness . . . and that has been accomplished in the space of only a few years.

It does not matter where the words come from... We have some words like 'Rug' in our language only because the Anglo Saxons made slaves of the Celts they displaced... Many words entered the language by conquest or defeat... That is not the point...

The point is that the utilitarian value of language, of government and economy too is ruined as part of the process where life is sucked out of the society.... We should be a nation... If one person's freedom means slavery for another we will never be a nation... If one person's security is everyone else's insecurity we will never be a nation.... If one person's truth is a lie to everyone else we will never be nation... The more people turn the language or the governmnet or the economy or the etc, and etc, forms of relationship to serve a purely individual purpose thinking nothing of the future or the common need -the more they will have their good at the price of everyone else's bad...

Societies do not just die... Languages do not just die... People, individual people, kill them... Maybe if liars were hung from lamposts, people would reconsider that when they destroy the language they destroy what everyone needs to rely on for unity, trust, and survival... Those people who say that when a society rots it rots from the top down are right, and it rots through a medium of language... It is like the life blood of society, and the society cannot be robbed of meaning without the language being robbed of meaning in the process...

Look at the lowest rungs of society... When some scum defrauds a girl of her vrginity, and says he loves her he is not doing anything different than the highest politicians in the land when they say they love the country... When you cannot trust the words people say, or the meaning of the words people use to get what they think they want your society is dead... No one can live in a state of paranoia, but what is the alternative??? Isn't it clear that everyone wants what everyone else has got??? What will they not say to get it??? It is hard to work to get what you want and easy to tell a lie, so what do you think will happen first??? Since there is so little recrimination for those who tell the big lie to a success, why should we not do so; but then, what are our relationships good for... The immorality; the total demoralization of society is their actual destruction, and the events that finally kill them are only history...

Well, this thread is fucked now . . . i'm outta here . . .

Don't let the door hit you in the ass... And you are all ass, so it is an inviting target... And hard to miss...