I mercifully don’t recall; I just know that I read somewhere recently that it is becoming acceptable. (I have some very vague sense that it might have had to do with what ETS, those fine folks who write the SATs and other tests, accept - but I could be completely wrong on that).
Anyway, apologies for not having a cite. I’m sure I speak for many of us here when I say I hope there really isn’t one, and I just dreamed that this construction is becoming accepted.
I’m guessing this was intended as “mute point”. Yes, same issue.
I swear that was autocorrect! I didn’t notice it until it was too late to edit. Yup, I was referring to the confusion between “mute point” and “moot point.”
Yup, it was autocorrect - it just did it again. But I’m undoing it before hitting submit.
You hardly ever see the noun except in the phrase “just deserts,” but the verb “to deserve” is still plenty common.
This thread has moved way too fast since yesterday. I promise I’ll read everything but I needed to responded to this buried comment.
Bonified is a common misspelling for it — and one that attracts a lot of mockery — but it’s actually a word. Bonify is a somewhat archaic term that means to make something good, especially something that was bad before. Both the bona of bona fide and the bon of bonify come from the Latin word for good, bonus.
Perfect description for a professional “wordie”. Even so, would she approve? Probably not. Insufficiently common.
Nope.
Schrödinger’s sandwich. The quantum superposition of the unobserved sandwich collapses into existence/nonexistence based on the appetite of the observer.
A friend of mine who is fantastically smart uses the expression. She’s someone I’ve always felt had a refined elegance to her manner; she also doesn’t seem to curse, in my recollection. I don’t have an issue with the phrasing.
Quite so. To be precise, the probability of the existence or non-existence of a half-remembered half sub in the fridge is inversely proportional to my desire for it. If I were particularly hungry (or, to fashionably deprecate the subjunctive, if I was particularly hungry) the half sub would not be there.
I never confused the two spellings, but I used to misunderstand its meaning. I formerly thought it meant “a point not worth making because it’s become irrelevant due to a changing situation” but it actually means “a point that is impossible to know or determine for certain”.
I used to be bothered by the misuse of the phrase “begging the question”, but I’ve become resigned to the ubiquity of the new meaning it’s taken on.
And if there’s a teenager in the house, the odds of the sandwich being there go down.
If I write it thusly:
“If you are hungry, there is a sandwich in the fridge…”
do your feelings change?
I know mine do. The ellipsis represents the unspoken, and unnecessary for understanding, but necessary for grammatical completeness, hence the ellipsis “you may have.”
Yes, of course, you may also have it if you are not hungry, so let the ellipses stand for “that may satisfy you,” or whatever works for you: “which I was saving for tomorrow, but I don’t mind you having instead”; or anything that fits the stem.
Myself, I am being stubborn about “literally,” because unlike some other words that became intensifiers, there is no other word that quite means “literally.” I am forced to come up with long and awkward constructions involving the word “verbatim,” that still don’t exactly mean what I want.
Also, will someone explain why I correctly typed FOUR (4) periods in my ellipsis coming at the end of a sentence, but it posted with THREE (3)?
No, not particularly. I see what you are saying: that the ellipsis changes the sentence to the equivalent of “You may have the sandwich that’s in the fridge if you are hungry.”
However, I don’t think the ellipsis matters. It’s all about the pragmatics, with or without that bit of punctuation.
And as a matter of pragmatics, of course I accept that “if you’re hungry, there is a sandwich in the fridge” is absolutely fine - just as “Can you get me the paper that’s on the table over there?” means “will you please pick up that piece of paper on the table and hand it to me?” not, “are you physically capable of the act of picking up that piece of paper and transferring it into my hands?”
It’s just something about my brain that always picks up on that particular construction. Even though it isn’t meant to be taken literally as an if-then statement, it sounds like one.
The ‘sandwich in the fridge if you’re hungry’ thing reminds me of a programmer joke…
A programmer’s wife calls him at work and says “honey, can you stop at the market on the way home and pick up a gallon of milk, and if they have eggs, get six?”
When he walks in the door, his wife says “why in the hell do you have six gallons of milk?!?”
“They had eggs.”
Similarly, “if I don’t see you again, have a nice weekend.” Apparently, the enjoyment of my weekend is conditional on not seeing you again…
I recognize the speaker means “in case I don’t see you again [before the weekend], have a nice weekend.”
Cf. the old joke: “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Bob. For those of you who do know me, I’m Fred!”
Context is everything. Everything. Virtually every argument in this thread has been about context. Spoken vs. written. Formal vs. casual. Some people have already posted eloquent and cogent pieces that explain where and when these different contexts apply, and therefore where and when objections are legitimate.
Formal written constraints apply to an insignificant fraction of the multiple trillions of words that flood the world each day. The vast majority of those words are spoken, most of them in casual, informal, and personal exchanges. Our brains can supply missing words, replace words that were uttered mistakenly, and even create the context that has been left out.
As someone who has been married over 50 years, I can attest that many conversations with my spouse would drive AI crazy.
What happened to the …
Didn’t you have it before we …
Sure, but then you …
Over there, then, on the other end of the …
Which other end, oh, never mind. I see it.
The written language always has borrowed from and followed changes in the spoken language, although usually with a lag in time. One major reason for this was that most written language had moderators, called editors. Editors stayed within the constraints of style guides, which like all bureaucratic rule-making were issued to lessen complaints from the loudest and most influential. Many, many different style guides existed even in the strictest eras, some written, some impressed into brains by teachers, and some wholly personal. Style guides and editors could exist solely because those who wrote words that the public saw were an infinitesimal segment of the daily word flood.
That statement is no longer true. The vast public has been let loose to write words that any other member of a worldwide public might see. The fraction of written words in the daily flood is the highest since the invention of written languages. Few moderators exist to police these words. Style guides and their tyranny still exist and still apply to certain writers on certain sites. Other transmitters, from message boards to social media to text messages, allow users to be free to write in any mode that pleases them. Many, perhaps most, untrained and never constrained users, tend to write how they speak. People speak differently to different hearers but linguists who record spoken language reveal that ordinary conservation is a loose jangle of words, only occasionally forming any resemblance to the formal language taught in school.
Most of the time this lack of precision is utterly meaningless. True, we all have had misunderstandings, from the trivial to the serious. I’d guess that the majority of those rose from misstatements rather than the lack of precision in the word flow. We are very good at picking up references from a succession of "it"s and experienced in filling in missing nouns. We know that’s true just by looking at memes, which condense thousands of hours of arguments into a few not necessarily coherent words.
I’ve written over a million words for public consumption. I take writing seriously. I’m my own style guide, however. Whatever I write is correct, and my usage can’t be faulted. (Except by me. Everything is written and rewritten.) When, not if, I use ain’t or irregardless I do so with forethought and purpose. I was schooled long before the internet; formality is ingrained in me. I can get irritated by the looser styles prevalent today but that’s about as meaningful as saying that today’s music is all bad. “It ain’t my style” can not and should not be the same as “it’s wrong.”
I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t know hapax legomenon if s/he/it came up to me and bit me.
Forget sandwiches and hunger. Let us instead consider good vacations (or weekends, or trips or many other things) and encountering our friends.
“If I don’t see you, have a good vacation!”
I have been unable to employ this construction since I high school English teacher (best teacher EVER !) asked, “and if you do see me, should I not enjoy the summer?”
Sure, every speaker of colloquial English understands what is implied: “in case I don’t see you, let me wish you a good vacation now.” But the illogic of the actual words, once pointed out to me, has kept me from using it ever since.
It means both those things.
Excellent post, particularly about spoken vs. written styles, and how the Interwebs have broadened the latter so they overlap the former more than in previous eras…but an accurate transcription of almost any spoken utterance (including our own) would still strike most of us as surprisingly haphazard — full of hesitations, redundancies, and “holes.”
John McWhorter once mentioned a college acquaintance who talked like he (or most any of us) writes, and that it was annoying. Dopers tend to be highly educated, and so many of us are inclined a bit toward this habit — but even for us, my point stands about accurate transcriptions of spoken English revealing it to be less formal and less “logical” than we assume.