What are your pet peeves re English usage?

McTag wrote:

I really think Webster did you guys a big disservice, all kidding aside.

We've got checks and cheques, checkers and chequers. You haven't.

The distinctions are useful. They mean different things.

While some letters may have disappeared, McTag, the distinctions haven't necessarily. They may have gone, of course if the word was no longer useful.

'get' has but one spelling and some, what is it, ..., 150 different meanings. Lots of words have multiple meanings. Consider how many different meanings the word **** has.

Here's an example where even with the "wrong" choice, most people unconsciously inserted the "right" meaning.

British "UFO" Hacker Faces 70 Years In US Prison For Military Breeches

Yeah, okay, the military really has some weird clothing but isn't 70 years a bit much. Given this 99% of fashion designers should get life.

I have two or three Webster's and I've looked into them from time to time and something's not quite right. "Outta whack" as Dylan has it. Meanings are given, and then not all of them, which have a distinct mark of pedantry. You can tell they have been composed by a bunch of po-faced Presbyterians. There's no wit.


Under "Slime", for example, my Webster's makes no mention of phlegm or mucus or semen as the Oxford does. It's as if there's some shame attaching to those naturally occuring substances.

And no other meanings which the Oxford does give --" To smear or cover with slime. To make one's way in a slimy fashion. To crawl slimily; to become slimy.

Then it misses out Slime-pit. And that stuff about being morally defiled.

It's like the only slime there is is the underfoot mud and the only thing to do with that is wait until it dries and pave it over.


I'm not sure what good it would do to list every natural or unnatural substance that is of this nature, Spendius. The point isn't to encyclopediize the dictionary, it's to get the definition across. The human mind can make the necessary leap to other things slimy.

I'm not sure which M-W you have but from my experience M-W lists the various meanings under different parts of speech headings.

I'm not saying which is superior. I think both languages are evolved out of the landscape. But your's is a graft and resistance to the Mother Tongue draws you deeper into that landscape

And BrE is a multiple graft of many other languages, Spendi. Not to suggest any higher order here, but if I'm not mistaken, AmE has been described as being closer to older forms of English than BrE.

[quote]

Does this spell the end of proper English?

...

It is, of course, not a new worry, as Professor David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, points out. "American English has been been influencing British English for the last 150 years. With the internet you see a huge amalgam of spellings from all over the place, and the old American v British idea seems to be much less prominent."

Though in some ways, it turns out, the advertisers of this film are actually correct. "Middle English (Chaucer etc) uses the French spelling 'centre'," notes John Simpson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. "After that, between the 16th and 18th centuries, we tended to respell it "as pronounced - center."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/23/britishidentity.usa

We have socks, one sock, one pair of socks.

When an American writes "sox" when the meaning is socks (and not some oxide of sulphur not sulfur), I don't feel superior, I feel kind of sad.

So I don't hold Mr Webster in the same regard.

I always find it hilarious when the English make apparently authorative statements about the meaning of a word or expression in the American language.

Noah Webster rules.

dropping any reference to stockings.

Point taken. JTT, but I don't think you should dumb down the language and expect to be praised for it.
There was something in the news about that yesterday, coincidentally.
Somebody was saying that since undergraduates' work was so full of mistakes, alternative spellings (!) should be acceptable.
Like twelth for twelfth, for example.

Bleedin' Nora. Or Norah.


http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/mortarboard/2008/08/does_spelling_matter.html

You must be kidding JTT.

Do you mean we could spell television like sausages if we so chose and we would get used to it.

Or knickers like rocketry?

This is exactly the kind of tripe i'm talking about. The use of the word "sox" is restricted by tacit consent to references to one of baseball's major league teams who have once had "stocking" in the name. They are the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox. The Cincinnati team have simply become the Cincinnati Reds, dropping any reference to stockings.

If anyone in America uses "sox" when they ought to be using "socks," it's no different from people in England who butcher the language for the purpose of texting, or out of native stupidity.

M-W

Main Entry:
sox

plural of sock

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

sox

NOUN: A plural of sock1 (sense 1).

Cambridge
sock (CLOTHES)
noun [C] plural socks or US ALSO sox
a piece of clothing made from soft material which covers your bare foot and lower part of the leg:
a pair of socks

You must be kidding JTT.

Do you mean we could spell television like sausages if we so chose and we would get used to it.

Or knickers like rocketry?

It's not what JTT said; what he did say is absolutely true. Writing is simply a code, generally [universally?] agreed upon by the majority of users of a given language. When we speak of 'language' qua language, we are speaking of a convention of oral symbols used for purposes of mutually intelligible communication. Writing is always a code, a system of visual symbols. You could spell television as 2@#$47zip. As long as we all knew that these symbols refer to a specific object which we all recognize, it would be the correct spelling.