In an INSPIRED comment, he said of Elmer F-f-f-fudd: “What a NIMROD.”
Awesome for three reasons: Making fun of Elmer’s hunting prowess, making it sound dorky, and using an inherently-funny word (cf. Kumquat, Platypus, Spatula).
Oh, and I’d like to applaud RedSwinglineOne… can you come speak to my class?
I assure you that my students who were “literally starving to death” this morning and were “late because there were like** literally** millions of police cars blocking the street” were NOT using the word with any irony or understanding or even self-awareness.
Unlike the situation with momentarily, though, what you indicate as the “incorrect” definition of presently is much more logical to me. And, frankly, there are sufficient words and phrases meaning “soon” that presently is not missed for that purpose.
“Fulsome” probably fits the bill. Often used nowadays to mean ‘at length’ but the previously accepted definition was to convey something was overly lavish to the point of being toadying/ insincere. This gives scope for potential misunderstandings when its frequently used to describe apologies made or the amount of praise heaped on someone. Without further context, either definition might be true.
No word to ad. I just wanted to note that I am always amused by the way our language works. Once a word is misused enough and the misuse is commonly accepted by the masses the dictionary writers say “Fuck it”, include the meaning, and SHAZAM! it’s legit. I imagine that occurs in other languages as well.
That’s how all languages work, always and ever. It’s just more noticeable now than at any other point in history because of how connected we are and the historical records of usage we have access to.
That makes sense. Language and the art of communicating is interesting. IN the early 80s I was in a Yankee band in FL. I remember on rural southerner talking to me and between the accent and the slang I wasn’t familiar with, I was struck by the fact that this person was speaking English and I had no idea what she was saying.
Yup, all of them - in fact, that’s one of the two main “schools” of linguistics.
Descriptivists say that whichever word definition or grammatical constructs the majority of people use is or becomes, for all intents and purposes, the correct one - because that’s what most people will understand the word to mean. According to them, the object of language is to communicate ideas, and it doesn’t really matter what form the process takes as long as both parties extract the same meaning from a given message. If 80% of people think that “yes” means “no”, then “no” is a possible and entirely valid acception of the word “yes”.
Prescriptivists reply : “No, goddammit ! This word only means *that *! It means that, because it’s derived from this word, this latin root and so forth. That’s how people have used that word for as long as we can trace it, and adding new meanings to it only leads to chaos and communication breakdowns. So stop misusing it and learn the right word to say what you mean, you ignoramus you. Oh, and don’t split infinitives or I swear to God I will END YOU.”
Oddly, in one specialized use it went in, not quite a different direction, but a skewed one: the initial strikings of coins from a new die “proved” it by showing that it would function effectively as a die for striking coins, and were in consequence called “proofs.” But because the first coins from a good new die were the crispest, clearest ones before it began to wear, a “proof coin” came to be, not the first and highest quality regularly struck coins, but specially struck coins using exceptional quality dies and burnished planchets, made especially for coin collectors.
Well let’s be descriptivists. You misspelled “for all intensive purposes.”
These two positions should be on a continuum. Someone who is on either far extreme perhaps doesn’t really exist. Some, like l’Académie française, are far along it, though. It is acceptable to be okay with “literally” while decrying text-speak or “must of.” I try not to use either but would argue that it is best if the alternate mode actually adds to language (more synonyms, whatever), than is simply a misspelling or grammatical error.
Actually, not so much that he wouldn’t listen, but that the advice was disastrously poor. “Ethelred the Badly Advised” would be closer to what “Unready” meant.
I’m going to go ahead and expand that change of meaning to the other common sense of discipline - that of an academic field of study. With all kinds of scholars now competing for professional status, a discipline in academia is just as much about not trespassing on foreign territory or challenging conventions (often unwritten ones) as it is about intellectual inquiry.
IMO, an educated prescriptivist wouldn’t actually have any problems with splitting infinitives in English. That rule was imposed externally and artificially by someone who wanted English to work like Latin (where the infinitive form in a single word and therefore cannot be split).
And again, IMO an educated *descriptivist *will make distinctions between new forms of language that are correct from an objective linguistic standpoint and things that are actually speech errors.
Yes, I was probably being overly simplistic. It’s true that, as in most things, reality lies along a spectrum rather than discrete categories. Then again, as Shot From Guns notes, prescriptivists aren’t entirely against new terms, and descriptivists don’t let anything slide right on by either- it’s not a simplistic order vs. chaos thing. These guys can and do use their heads.
Except maybe my own dear loathsome Académie. Do keep on mocking the absurd, antiquated neckbeards, for they deserve every last bit of flak they get. I’ll give them a cédérom…
(No, no, no. I don’t care what your borderline xenophobic excuse is. You don’t pull a substantive out of your ass to use in lieu of an acronym, however foreign. Stop that, it’s silly.)
Yes, I was being facetious there. I’m afraid I do that [del]sometimes[/del] always.
