Well, I only noticed it recently. I’m well-known for being the last to notice these sorts of things.
I have never heard this construction and, yes, I agree it sounds really weird and wrong to my ears. The rest of the examples in this thread sound fine to me.
What about “release the hounds”?
That’s been a really common term since at least the 90s. ETA: Saw ZipperJJ’s note, doesn’t surprise me that it was used even earlier.
That’s being used as a transitive verb (taking a direct object.)
This could just be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
No, I hadn’t noticed, even though I’ve seen the word used that way many times. This suggests to me that it’s quite a natural turn of phrase, and that it’s probably been around longer than a prescriptivist like you would think.
I don’t mind the evolution of language, but I seriously have never seen or heard this usage. Is it really that common?
Doesnt really matter. Ift you could travel a hundred + years into the future, you wouldn’t be able to understand what people are saying anyway.
Sure you would. I bet you have little problem understanding English from 1916. Or 1816. Or 1716. Maybe a couple hundred more and it becomes a bit more difficult.
Not to point a finger at the OP, but another problem is people trying to impose Latin grammar on the English language.
Mayhaps, but probably not. 100 years can easily be within a single human lifespan. If I traveled back to 1916 I don’t think there would be all that much difficulty with mutual intelligibility as long as I avoided using copious amounts of slang and tech terms, of course.
ugh I should have known half the responses from the SDMB would be calling me out for prescriptivism
let me rephrase
Have you noticed this usage of “release” and does it sound new or different or unusual (but not right or wrong) to you?
Even if you couldn’t totally understand them, you’d know they were talking about your weird clothes.
Release used in this way sounds pretty normal to my ears. It’s pretty common to hear “This product will GA in three weeks” where GA is General Availability, or “This product will RTO on …” where RTO is Release to Operations. In the software industry its just so commonplace that no one here would even notice it.
I dunno. We seem to do OK with the Elizabethan English in the works of Shakespeare, for example. Some of the outdated vocabulary and allusions require footnotes, but in an actual conversation (which would likely use far less poetic imagery) you could probably muddle through just fine. Shakespeare died 400 years ago. I see no reason why 400 years from now we wouldn’t be able to muddle through just as well.
On the other hand, future people might have a lot more trouble with Shakespeare than we, given the span for them is 800 years. On the third hand, Jean-Luc Picard seemed to handle it pretty well.
Yeah, I apologize for starting that diversion…its my own pet peeve.
To answer your question. No I don’t find that use of ‘release’ to be weird unusual, or different.
To me, it smacks of marketing-speak. I’d never use it myself. I don’t consider it wrong per se, but it’s grating in the same way that other marketing buzzwords are.
I have a different take on it. I think it is an example of verbing the noun “release”. And it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
Yes, we understand the language of 1916 just fine. But would they understand us? A couple decades I read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards a story of a man who time-travelled to 2000 and then came back to the late 19th century and reported on what he found. The language he quoted the year 2000 people as using sounded laughably archaic. Oddly enough, the language of the book itself didn’t seem so dated. Or maybe it is just a difference in expectation.
You say that as if other languages’ gramnnars werr any less so.
Ok, in what context are you guys hearing or reading this? General conversation/message boards/day-to-day speech? Niche magazines about the game or entertainment industry? General news? I’m still trying to figure out how I’ve never heard or seen this usage. Judging by the responses here, it does seem to be common, but where?