To say nothing of what I think of the argument, the word basically is a useless modifier and it doesn’t even mean what it’s trying to stand for in that context.
By and large, …
I just don’t get this one. It doesn’t make any literal sense.
And the next three aren’t really wrong, but I’m still vaguely annoyed when they’re used:
Stand on line
No, you stand in line. If there is a literal line on the ground, you can stand on the line.
Eat dinner
I started noticing this a few years ago, and it just strikes me as very odd phrasing. Took me a while to figure out why… dinner is something that I generally consider an event, which therefore cannot be eaten. My own hang up but what you are eating for dinner != dinner itself.
Acks (in place of ask)
I list this as one that should be accepted, but still drives me crazy. I just don’t agree that words must be pronounced as they’re spelled (and so many in English aren’t, anyway), and I do think that languages are an oral tradition (as is being debated elsewhere on this thread). But it just sounds ugly when somebody wants to “Acks me a question.”
I’m not sure what you want me to address. I do think some people are more eloquent than others, give more stirring speeches, make better writers, and whatever else. This has little to do with my feelings that many of the things criticized in this thread as erroneous use of language should not be considered erroneous.
Picture a cheap styrofoam cup and a beautifully hand-crafted lacquered porcelain cup. It’s obvious which one is higher quality, and to be certain using a styro cup would be a considerable faux pas in certain situations and many people don’t like them, but it would be (to use Indistinguishable’s word) erroneous to claim that the styrofoam cup is not a cup at all. Both are cups, and when it comes to the job of holding liquid, both are more than capable.
Also, damn you for not having an easily nicknamed name, Indy. So there.
Are you skating around it or do you really just not get it?
There are two ends of the scale. If someone is a great speaker then someone can be a poor speaker. If someone has mastered the English language then someone can also have failed to grasp it.
Yes, you’re correct, but not in the way you think. Someone who has failed to grasp English cannot make themselves understood at all to English speakers. If someone makes themselves understood, just with words you don’t like to hear, that’s not really their problem.
My answer is that I don’t feel like I’m skating around anything and I don’t feel like I’m failing to “get” anything, other than in the sense that I don’t of course subscribe to the position I suppose I am being accused of failure to “get”. If you ask a more specific question, I can give a more focused answer.
It’s not weak at all. The material of the cup is the dialect of the language. The ability to hold the liquid is the ability to make oneself understood. It is exactly apt and there is nothing wrong with it.
In fact, let me take it farther. Suppose you have a cup made of wire mesh. This would be a completely garbled and ungrammatical language claimed to be a dialect of English. But it doesn’t hold liquid/make itself understood, and so is not a good cup/good English. But just as you never see wire mesh cups intended to hold liquid, so too do you never hear dialects of English that fail to communicate. They don’t come into practice because they simply don’t work.
The only assessment you are making is whether or not they are speaking in the correct register you believe they should be speaking in. You are pointing at a styrofoam cup and saying that it has no place at your table.
Okay, the liquid is the language. The vessel is the speaker.
Whether the person is a dapper businessman (porcelain cup) or a homeless person (styrofoam cup) they both may be very eloquent speakers. They both may have mastered the English language. That is not what you meant but that is how your analogy works.
I mostly agree with you, Bosstone, except that I do think that some dialects, or at least vocabulary semantical choices, are better at communicating some ideas than others. For instance, the semantics in which “literally” can mean “figuratively”, but also sometimes means “literally”. If you use “literally” in both ways, then you will do a worse job at communicating your ideas than someone who does not. Of course, you can make up for this by being better at communicating this distinction using body language and tone of voice and context, but all else being equal, you are choosing to use language in an imprecise way, one that does have the actual potential for miscommunication.
No, not at all. You’re forcibly changing the analogy rather than trying to understand what I’m saying. As I said, the vessel is the dialect, or register if you prefer. I can drink out of a styro cup as easily as a porcelain, and I can talk shit with my bros just as well as I can engage in pompous and overly-correct elocution in front of a group of accomplished scholars. I have no trouble being understood using either register (holding liquid using either kind of cup). The worst offense I might commit is using a styro cup when I should be using porcelain, but that doesn’t mean the bottom is suddenly going to fall out of the styro.
In fact, you are going that far. You don’t want a styrofoam cup on your table, and you don’t want to hire someone who speaks, say, West Coast surfer slang in the office. It is exactly the same.