I guess so. What I mean is, they use it as part of their slang and see it as slang - saying ‘vexed’ far more than most adults do - and usually I’d have to say ‘don’t use slang’ in some kinds of work (it’d be fine in others and in general classroom usage). But this is not one of the words I’d correct them for using. Hope that makes sense.
I don’t think steampunk as a source for the revival of the use of “engine” in computing is all that likely. Engine has a long history in computing, prior to the 1990’s, namely in usages like “graphics engine” and “inference engine” in programming languages like Prolog (that dates back to the 1970’s).
Could we revive the old english “ye”? Of course, we would need to add the “thorn” character to the alphabet. I allways liked “ye”.
By the way, when did the thorn go out of use?
It started being supplanted by th in England during the 14th century. Caxton used it only in a few very specific word forms- three or four at most, IIRC.
I think it’s still used in Irish, but I might be confusing it with eth.
My boss asked me why i didn’t have my report ready, I told him I did not deign to do it!
Nice word-how is it related to “reign”? I know “reigning” is what a king does, is there such a word as “deigning”?
‘Varmint’ is one word that I associate with the Wild West era (probably through watching too many Yosemite Sam cartoons) but which is actually much older: http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/varmint
Oh, for heaven’s sake! I am firmly descriptivist, but point out regularly that most ‘prescriptivism’ is merely reporting descriptively the usage customs of the more formal modes of English speech and writing, for the benefit of those who have grown up familiar with colloquial usage and who now have questions about formal usage. It differs little from someone raised in Hawaii and speaking fluent Hawaiian-dialect Japanese (which I presume does not incorporate the ‘respectful’ nuances of formalized address in Japan) seeking to inform him/herself as to what is ‘proper’ in the more formal settings he or she may encounter in visiting Japan on business.
Mrs. Kendrew, who taught me Latin, had a specific meaning for the term ‘gender’ that explained why agricola and nauta, First Declension nouns referring to male individuals, took First Declension endings but were modified by adjectives taking second declension forms. Other people have over the years had specialized meanings for the term.
What Hostile Dialect ought to have said, had he been mindful to be a precisionist in his definitions, is that social scientist and commentators on sexuality regularly employ ‘gender’, carefully distinguished from ‘sex’, to convey the distinction he reported. He might have added that this appears to be by far the most common usage of the term outside specialized disciplines such as comparative grammar and bacteriology, in the 21st Century.
That a term is often used synonymously with another, the usefulness of the distinction sometimes made between them being blurred, is certainly descriptively true. It does not follow that writers and speakers wishing to make that distinction are in error in demanding of their readers or listeners that they accord them the right to make that distinction.
In another recent thread on usage, I brought up the point that parliamentarians distinguish between “Chairman” the elected office and “Chair” the person presently presiding, whether the Chairman or not. Exapno Mapcae rightly pointed out that the two terms are regularly used synonymously – missing my whole point that there is a distinction worth preserving in the customary usage. I believe the same thing is valid here. No German speaker actually believes his child is neuter and his car female – but he speaks a language in which they are those grammatical genders. Nor does anyone actually believe that drag queens are of female sex – but they present as feminine in their routines, a gender construct.
Old people around here have always said it to refer, for example, to possums. “Vermin” is another great word that hasn’t gone out of use but has become IMHO uncommon. Today the library is full of vermin, and the cockroaches are getting pretty offended about it.
Thorn (intriguingly, since the modern sound is the voiced TH of edh). The character for thorn was a vertical with an angle drawn off it ‘pointing right’, roughly like this: |>. This made it very easy to confuse with another obsolete Anglo-Sxaon letter, wen, which had a semicircle in place of the angle, something like the overstriking of a p and b on a typewriter. Edh, on the other hand, was in upper case a D and in lower case an italic d, looking much like a lowercase Greek delta, each with a crossbar through the vertical about midway along its length. Visualize uppercase edh by mentally sliding the hyphen to the right in -D; lowercase, imagine an unlooped script d with a crossbar through the ascender.
When used in political and military discourse, the term “occupy” was neutral. However, after the War in Iraq started, the Republicans and their conservative brain trust decided to politicize the term. As a result, “occupying” became what the Nazis were doing in Europe during WWII and what the Soviets were doing Afghanistan. What America was doing in Iraq was “liberating” and anybody saying they were “occupying” was a no-good, dirty, treasonous piece of America-and-troop-hating fecal matter. With the end of the Bush Administration, I suspect this definition of “occupy” has now mostly fallen by the wayside (at least I hope so).
Some half-misconceptions about edh (ð) and thorn (þ) in this thread. Neither was ever used in Irish, though the uncial script used in Irish manuscripts is closely related to the Old English scripts where such letters occur. (Regular [d] has a tilty-back line instead of an upright one.) Old Irish th /θ/ was usually represented by [th], and /ð/ by medial or final [d], sometimes with a dot over it. Both sounds disappeared from the language by the Middle Irish period.
Each of the two Anglo-Saxon letters made both voiced and voiceless sounds (then / thin) in Old English. This is contrary to both Icelandic usage and common sense, so a lot of people refuse to believe it, but have a look at some manuscipts. It’s the same reason OE used [f] for both /f/ and /v/, and [s] for both /s/ and /z/. Þ did survive in a few high-frequency cases such as þe (the) or þ[sup]t[/sup] (that). Those did evolve graphically to y[sup]e[/sup] and y[sup]t[/sup]. Ye, the old nominative second person plural pronoun, fell out of use in most (but not all) dialects, but was a separate word: Get ye to þe nunnery (misquoted for example’s sake).
It’s awfully close to the same meaning, at least in the adjectival sense. Radios are machines that transmit data without wireless, and a wireless card is a machine that transmits data without wires. The difference is that one of them is a switched network and one isn’t, but it’s all just radio waves.
Also, responding to a previous poster, “wireless” is used as a noun these days, but for the network, not the end device. “Can you get on the wireless?” means “Are you able to connect to the wireless network?”
