Verbal used to mean in words, either in written or spoken form. Oral meant spoken. Sadly, people seem to shrink from oral, perhaps due to the junior-high mentality tittering about oral sex. Verbal has taken its place. Verbal has lost an important facet of its meaning. It can no longer be applied to written words without causing confusion.
That makes me sad.
Blah, blah, blah, yes, English is a living and growing language. . . So, in exchange for the loss of oral and the dumbing-down of verbal we get, what, the verb to network?
I feel your pain, my friend. In the current thread on smelly foods in the pit, I was involved in a little tiff over the proper use of nauseous. I mourn the loss of precision in language that seems to be going on around me. Just because a language changes and grows doesn’t mean it has to degenerate.
Hey, some parts will wither and fall off, while other parts blossom and bear new fruit. We need to compost to ensure rich, fertile soil. There will be new growth in the spring. This of course is the Chauncey Gardener school of linguistics, but hey, it makes sense to me!
My dear friend Qadgop the Mercotan shows up and starts spouting off about Chauncey Gardner, and you know you’ll drag me into the conversation.
I’m a big believer that language is as precise and as vague, as elegant and as crude, as diverse and as universal, as exquisite and as hideous, as universal and as picayune, as philanthropic and as miserly, as kind and as harsh, as bipolar and as multi-infarct and as unpredictable as it needs to be.
If you don’t like the level of discourse among your friends or in what you read or in what you see or hear, I suggest surrounding yourself with friends, books, and entertainment that have better vocabularies.
I’m gonna hit “Submit Reply” now and pray I haven’t misspelled anything.
I don’t know, I find that disconnect is the perfect word sometimes. It has more nuance than “miscommunication” or “misunderstanding” - it implies something more fundamental, a clash of goals or perspectives. I’m usually a word snob but I appreciate functionality like that.
I believe that ironic has unfortunately become a synonym for “coincidental”. Alanis Morissette pretty much put the nail in that coffin. I still whine about it though.
We have of course given up Chad as an adult male name, but gained so much more in return.
I have to agree with KneadToKnow on this one. In the times of Pepys and Jonson and Shakespeare there were probably armies of regular folks out there simply murdering the language as it was at the time, but getting full, practical use from it. (As an aside, the Bard was a real fan of taking any noun close at hand and using it as a verb, something that galls purists today.)
I like to think I speak well and enjoy the fine shadings of definiton that my vast vocabulary and penchant for minutiae allow me to make ;). When you do run into someone who not only understands and appreciates such usage but gives it back in full kind your life is richer for having met a kindred soul. You are obligated under the rules of leading a happy life to not let them out of your sight. (Handcuffs optional.)
All this reminds me of a thread (my first!) I was thinking of starting. A bit of advice though is needed: Which board is most appropriate for wordplay?
Happy to be here among the cogniescenti (arghh, sp?)
One that bugs me is using “decimate,” which originally meant to reduce by one-tenth, as the equivalent of “devastate,” which means to wipe out or lay waste to.
I believe the Romans instituted the practice of decimation by executing every tenth person of a conquered village just to make the point that you’d better behave yourselves. Thus, they’d reduce the population by a tenth.
But the first definition for “decimate” in my dictionary is “to destroy a great number or proportion of.” Oh well, another battle lost!
Whilom, meaning “once upon a time”. Chaucer begins some of his Tales with this word.
Yon, meaning “something over there, out of reach”. You could say things like “This tree is tall, that tree is taller, but yon tree is tallest.” Instead you have to say “This tree is tall, that tree is taller, but that tree way over there is tallest.” Japanese has an equivalent word - if I remember correctly, kono = this, sono = that, and ano = yon.
Seems like most of the posts have focused on word change rather than word loss. Personally I think the English language has too many words with too many subtle shadings of meaning. “Elementary” can mean “pertaining to the elements of a discipline” or it can mean “simple”. We already have words to decribe both things: “fundamental” and “basic”, so why muddy the waters with “elementary”? More words let you be more precise when meanings are carefully differentiated, but they let you be obfuscatory when meanings are fluid. I think the current state of English is closer to the latter.
And, of course, we need to use words exactly the same way the Romans used them. That’s why we all speak Latin. :rolleyes:
There is nothing more useless than insisting that a word really means what it meant a couple of thousand years ago. Language doesn’t work that way. Next you’ll be complaining that you can’t orient yourself to the west.
And back when “decimate” was coined, I’m willing to be there were some Romans complaining about how the language is deteriorating. If we believe the language purists, it’s been deteriorating for so long that we’re only communicating in grunts.
Do you still raise an objection to such “deterioration” as “bus” or “mob”? That’s a battle that was lost long ago. Didn’t seem to hurt anything.
My friends and I (okay, just I ) still use hither, thither, yon, hence, and whence. I think yon actually mutated into yonder, did it not? Many people I know would say, “This tree is tall, that tree is taller, but that tree over yonder is tallest.”
Another word that seems to have been lost is doff - to remove. You still might occasionally hear don, but you rarely hear its opposite.
Disembark seems to have been replaced with the unfortunate off-board: “Please off-board the train…”
Perish the thought! It is that very breadth of expression that makes English such a wonderful language. The subtle nuances that we’re able to convey are unmatched in any language. Granted, we have a tendency to borrow words or phrases that catch our fancy, but that just highlights the importance that English-speakers put on the right shade of meaning.
I remember reading in the forward to a dictionary (Miriam-Webster? I don’t have a copy handy) that speakers of no other language have such a fascination with words. English dictionaries are found in the vast majority of English-speaking homes, which is not the case for other languages (although I wonder if this can be true of Japanese homes, for instance, since I’ve heard that that language is quite difficult to learn, even for native speakers).
I’m going to take the middle road here. In principle, I agree with the idea that a living language should be able to change naturally. However, I don’t like the accelerated change we are experiencing these days. I don’t like it because it’s artificial. It is top heavy. The main culprit is the dreaded “corporate speak”. Sad little whizzkid types in middle management butcher the language in an attempt to impress their peers and bosses. I don’t know which language is used by the corporation for which I work, but it certainly isn’t English. “Action” as a verb is my pet peeve. Also, they have given us ugly, cumbersome words like “upskilling” instead of “training”, and “human resources” in place of “staff”. Yuck.
) still use hither, thither, yon, hence, and whence. I think yon actually mutated into yonder, did it not? Many people I know would say, “This tree is tall, that tree is taller, but that tree over yonder is tallest.”