Considering you are a scientist that is weird to hear you say. I am willing to bet you can noodle out meaning of a word by its structure. With “irregardless” you have two negations. Prefix “ir” means “not” and suffix “less” means without.
So, not without regard.
How is that an improvement? How does the language make as much sense in the future when you toss this kind of linguistic structure out the window until you just have noises?
Is this how you were taught English? Is this how you would teach English to children?
I was taught English by having people speak English to me until I understood. They tried some other methods, in English class when I was a kid, but none of that helped me learn fluent English; then moved to America and lots of people spoke English to me (and I watched English cartoons) until it clicked.
I taught my kids English by speaking to them; it worked great for my older daughter, still a bit of a work in process for my younger one (as is age appropriate for her).
Inflammable is easy…it derived from a different language. It still has structure.
"The “in-” prefix in “inflammable” isn’t a negating prefix (like “in-” in “inactive” or “incorrect”). Instead, it’s a causative prefix from Latin meaning “to make” or “to cause.” So “inflammable” literally means “able to be set on fire” or “capable of catching fire.”
“Flammable” comes straight from the Latin “flammabilis,” with the same meaning.*
They’re both describing the same property—they just got to English through different etymological routes."
I do not know that other word. Never seen it before in my life.
Do you complain this much about, say, “manufactured”? Nowadays, that’s almost an antonym for “hand-made”, even though that’s what the roots of the word literally mean.
The same way (or the exact same way, to use the intensifier common to colloquial speech) language has continued to make sense despite the hundreds of thousands of changes dropped into it over the centuries.
You’re making the same argument as the British guy I referenced. If the language is not my language then it has lost purity and beauty. That pathetic plea has been uttered by thousands over the years, yet the language continues to grow and evolve by natural selection, not the voice of crotchety old pedants. We all have our personal likes and dislikes, but we shouldn’t force them on others.
If I were a teacher I would learn the best way to teach. All I know is that the way they used to teach was not the best way. I am instead a writer so I learned the best way for me to write. And that’s for my audience, not an imaginary body of critics.
Sorry, but absolutely not. The English language and the teaching of it was created in the 18th and 19th century by pedants who were irritated by the growing number of literates among the underclasses, i.e., not the small intellectual elite. They thought Latin was the queen of all language for all time and sought to mandate that its grammar be applied. Not splitting an infinite is impossible in Latin because the infinitive is one word. Importing that rule into English was fatuous.
Many books have laid out this history and its idiocy, but here’s a nice summary from Literary Hub.
The idea that English should be logical really got going with the popular grammarians of the late 18th century: Englishman Robert Lowth (1710–87) and American-in-England Lindley Murray (1745–1826) in particular. Rather than following the great writers and speakers as his model for good English, Bishop Robert Lowth’s A short introduction to English grammar (1762) dismissed the grammatical ken of everyone from John Milton to the King James Bible. Lowth argued that a double negative makes a positive and that one must say this is she rather than this is her. In other words, he started treating English as if it were mathematics. Negating a negative makes a positive. Two pronouns on either side of is must have the same (nominative) case, just like two numbers on either side of an equals sign must be equivalent.
Lowth’s grammar was popular in Britain, but also influential in America, where it was first reprinted in 1775. But Lowth’s rules became even more influential because they were imitated by the most successful grammar writer of the early 19th century: Lindley Murray. An American Quaker trained in law, Murray relocated to England after the revolution, hoping (don’t ask me why) that the weather in Yorkshire would improve his poor health. He published his English Grammar (1797) for the neighboring girls’ school, not intending to publish it further. But it proved too successful to hold back. Republished in the US in 1800, it went through ten editions in that first year alone. Murray repeated Lowth’s rules against double negatives, mismatched pronoun case, and prepositions at the ends of sentences, and added more rules, including the ban on singular they. These kinds of regulations, and the ill-applied logics used to argue for them, have plagued English ever since.
It’s now and has always been about class, not language.
It’s constructed along the same exact rules and has the structure you’re so keen on, so it should be easy to figure out what a Basilosaurus is based on the name.
Wow, two prefixes that mean precisely opposite things? Who came up with that shitty language and what more elegant, clear, and nuanced language is it a sad decaying husk of? (/sarcasm, obviously)
If you’re serious, then I agree that the language has lost a great deal if people cannot understand sarcasm even when that word was literally in the previous line and the reference for my comment.
Or you could used a smiley. That would have a perfect post for one.
Using just the base word is called a bare or zero infinitive, and has several applications in English. But it’s not what the pedants were referring to in any way and has no direct counterpart in Latin, to my knowledge. To be truthful, though, I know little Latin and fewer Greek. /s
English has a number of seemingly contradictory words arising from the evolution of language. The prefix “in-” is usually a negation, as in “inadequate” or “insincere”. Causing much perplexity among ESL students when it turns out that “invaluable” means “extremely valuable”, but that arose out of an attempt to express the idea that something was of such great value that it was inestimable, that you couldn’t put a price on it.
“Flammable” vs “inflammable” has a different history. “Inflammable” was the original word, derived from the Latin inflammare (“to set on fire, to inflame”), where “in-” is an intensive prefix meaning “into” or “to cause”. Hence “inflammable” made it into both French and English to mean “combustible”. AIUI, the word “flammable” was specifically introduced into the language for safety reasons, because our language is such a mess of different and contradictory conventions that authorities feared that some marginal illiterate would take “inflammable” to mean “perfectly safe to light up a cig here because this cannot catch fire”. Of course, one might say that one could care less about that, thus uttering one of the most common and annoying semantically ambiguous expressions in the language!
A great example, thanks!
Exactly. You might similarly say that
{some equation} < x or
{some equation} < {some other equation}.
You’re talking about concepts of magnitude, not countable physical objects.
No one would say “5 is fewer than 7”, but if anyone ever did, I would ask “fewer what”?
In case we run out of things to argue about, there’s also “amount of” versus “number of” which is very closely related to “less” and “fewer”, respectively, which has the same issue about continuous quantities versus countable discrete objects..
That one drives me nuts, too. Like, “there were an unusually large amount of people at the shopping mall today”. Oh, yeah? How many pounds of people were there?
I should have ben more (or many ) clear. I meant further back than the 18th century. More like the times of Shakespeare and further back in the past. That is in those days the language changed a lot more rapidly than it is now, probably in part due to those guys you mention from the 18th and 19th century. We can read, say, the US Constitution or the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. and it takes very little updating into today’s English. Jefferson and Franklin would have had a more difficult time with Shakespeare than we do with their writing. Shakespeare would have had an even more difficult time with Chaucer in comparison, and Chaucer an even more difficult time than that with Beowulf.
In other words, it doesn’t make much sense for there to have been English language pedants around back in the time of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or the anonymous writer of Beowulf because the language changed more quickly back then. Ranting about how “kids these days” are destroying the English language of grandpa and great grandpa doesn’t make sense when the person doing the ranting can’t help but notice that grandpa and great grandpa wrote in a language that was significantly different than his own. The story that Shakespeare himself seems to have spelled his own name several different ways during his lifetime hints at that.
That’s another thing we don’t really ‘need,’ objective case pronouns, other than it sounds odd for those of us (ha!, there’s one!) that who expect them (ha!, another one!) to be used in those contexts.
) clear. I meant further back than the 18th century. More like the times of Shakespeare and further back in the past. That is in those days the language changed a lot more rapidly than it is now, probably in part due to those guys you mention from the 18th and 19th century. We can read, say, the US Constitution or the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. and it takes very little updating into today’s English. Jefferson and Franklin would have had a more difficult time with Shakespeare than we do with their writing. Shakespeare would have had an even more difficult time with Chaucer in comparison, and Chaucer an even more difficult time than that with Beowulf.