Lewis Carol was writing a book to entertain young people. Considering how much more diligence was devoted in the day to having a stellar command of the English language I wouldn’t doubt that the original Alice understood he was being playful in his use of curiouser.
in brief, it’s Poor grammar that bothers me.
I didn’t read this thread, so it’s likely that some of my entries have already been listed, but hey, fuck it:
hella is not a word and even if it was, it would be a stupid word. Most of the time people use it, they mean “helluva” so they aren’t really shortening anything, they’re just sounding like tweekers.
brah instead of bro
I know nookyooler has already been listed, but damn it’s annoying.
Likewise irregardless
I had more when I started typing but I’m at work and forgot them.
Yeah, “curiouser” sounds like a non-standard construction to my ears. The general rule for comparatives and superlatives is that single syllable words get the “-er” and “-est” endings. Three or more syllables almost always get “more” or “most” before the word. Two syllables can go either way (usually with two-syllable words ending with a “y” like “happy” and “silly” getting the “-er” and “-est” suffix, and two-syllable words ending in “-ing,” “-ed,” “-ful” and “-less” always getting “more” and “most.” The rest usually take “more” and “most,” but some can go either way, like “quiet,” for example.)
So, with those guidelines, “curious” should be “more curious,” not “curiouser.” And rules or no rules, it sounds “off” to my ears (except being used in a playful fashion.)
My mom says “foilage” instead of “foliage”. I accept most pronunciations without complaint (except maybe playful teasing), but this one almost gives me an aneurysm every time a hear it. They’re plants, mom, not spray-painted aluminum foil. It took me a few times to even figure out what she was saying, which was not a fun conversation.
“<blah blah blah> Foilage”
“What?”
“Yeah, the foilage was really pretty.”
“I’m not sure I understand”
“All the foilage in the forest was really pretty”
“OH! Foliage!? Yeah, it was really pret-”
“YOU KNEW WHAT I MEANT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE RIGHT ALL THE TIME YOU KNOW JUST ACCEPT WHAT PEOPLE SAY AND DON’T CORRECT PEOPLE.” :mad:
“Uh… sorry?” 
I don’t know if I’m more annoyed about the word foilage (which is mostly just silly sounding), the fact that she went off on me, of the fact that she knows the real word and is probably just deliberately using foilage now to spite me.
Best. website. ever.
I want to weigh in on the “Great Literally Debate.” There is a weight loss commercial in which a woman exclaims, “You could literally SEE the fat melting off my body!” and it brings up such an ugly mental image that I cringe. She then goes on to squeal that her husband said, “Look at you!!” (Um, no… I think I’ll just wait until you’re done, thank you. :eek: )
So I was trying to envision a scenario that might cause confusion when I read about the man who literally shat his pants. No, I don’t think he shat his pants, but when I read that, I laughed so hard I literally fell out of my chair. (Or did I ? 
)
Clothahump, you reminded me of my father, and I thank you very much. He’s largely responsible for my pedantry, and I miss him.
Sometime in the early to mid 80s, everything anyone said, I said they were “going.” Eventually, predictably, it pushed him right over the edge. The rant started with, **“You teenagers!” ** and went on to say how we just bastardized the language any way we wanted to, taking words and changing them. “Where did you GO? You didn’t go anywhere, it’s what you said!”
A week later, I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and found this:
That said, I agree the word is overused.
I also find the habitual use of, e.g. "And Vicki goes, ’ what did you do that for? ’ ", highly annoying teen-speak. However, from general “feel” and perceived experience, I get the picture that for nonsense noises, rather than structured conversation – as with the kid’s “burton, burton, burton” – to “go” (insert noise), is long-standing, respectable usage; slightly colloquial, maybe. (Plus, it’s generally considered that imaginative authors have a “licence” to do a fair amount of making-and-breaking of rules !)
Burton, burton, burton?
I suspect that’s a cognate of “bood’n, bood’n, bood’n” (which is what I always heard), imitative of an internal combustion engine, sometimes said in conjuntion with referring to a vehicle taking off.
You of all people should have caught that. 
Heh. I didn’t associate what **vontsira **said with an onomatopoeia. I was wondering how her kids knew anything about Richard Burton, and why they’d repeat his name over and over. 
It really is great for these threads that involve pronunciation. Forvo.com really should needs to be more well-known around here.
God yes to this. I absolutely hate it when people say “axed” instead of “asked”. Please, just stop it.
Confusion maybe compounded a little here, by a quirk of this board’s “quote” facility. I was quoting as best as possible, from Why Child’s post # 247; but because Why Child’s citation of the excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s work – where on the momentous “day of the bomb”, the narrator, as a little kid, is playing with his toy trucks and making the “burton, burton” (or whatever) noise – was already a “quote” itself within his / her post; it was omitted from the quoted part from Why Child’s post, furnished for my reply to him / her. I thus made a probably not-too-lucid attempt at precis-ing Why Child’s quote from Vonnegut. (I suspect that this is all going to be found “as clear as mud”).
I didn’t know the rule but this is more than clear. Thank you. And I’m not slightly impressed. My mom was a sixth grade teacher and could explain literally anything grammatical. Literally. I just wing it from her good example. (And switchings.)
The sound of a vehicle? Around here we say “bod’n, bod’n, bod’n.” Unless it’s a Harley idling in which case it’s “potato, potato, potato.” (Never sounds that way to me but I understand that’s the correct phrase.)
And please, folks, it’s a fact that you can’t share anything between more than two people. That’s sharing among.
I taught English for some extra money when I was living abroad, and you learn these little things that you take for granted as a native speaker. I had never noticed there was a general rule before, and I had never been taught it in school. But it was in the EFL teaching materials. Also, stuff like zero, first, second, and third conditionals is something I never came across in grammar or high school English, but an important lesson for EFL learners. I know the constructions, but I’ve never had them itemized or grammatically explained before.
That reminds me of something that has aggravated my brain for years: A fast food restaurant, for example, has two sizes of drink, and one of them is called “medium”. GAH! A “medium” option requires a minimum of three options, with one option being smaller than “medium”, and another being larger than “medium”. If you only have two options, then one is “small” and the other is “large”. There is no “medium” with two or fewer!
I had a similar complaint about Tostitos Salsa con Queso. Every jar of the stuff is labeled “medium”. I even checked their web site, and could find no indication that they offer “hot” and “mild” versions of the stuff. There is only “medium”.
The drink one can be confusing. Small and large should be the options, as there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on what constitutes “medium” across fast-food establishments. I would have said 16 oz, but that seems to be a small in plenty of places.
Anyway, I have no issue with a salsa being labeled “medium.” To me, “mild” means almost no heat, nobody but the wimpiest palate is going to have an issue with this. Good for almost all taste buds. “Medium” means detectable heat to most; might/probably will be objectionable to people who don’t like spicy foods. “Hot” - detectable heat to everyone, definitely too hot for people who don’t like spicy foods.
You know, thinking about it, I realize Lewis Carol is probably not a good source for determining what is acceptable.
Good call. “Hella” appears to be a super contraction, from “hell of a” to “helluva” to “hell’a”. YMMV.
Yes. When and where did this start? I suppose equating me with a boobholder is more appropriate than implying I’m your relative, still, it irks.
Thank you for actually explaining. The rule seems to be that you don’t want to make multi-syllable words longer. If something is “commonplace”, and something else is even more so, you don’t say “commonplacer”. Hmmm.
I read Cat’s Cradle not too long ago, and that one stood out to me as strange. Even bood’n or bod’n doesn’t make sense to me. The mouth noise for car engine noises I’ve always used and heard is “vroom” or possibly “vrum”.
I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to suggest here.
These seem to be using a broader perspective than their own products. The salsa one, for instance, is talking of a broad scale of pepperiness/hotness that one might associate with food in general, or salsas as a whole. They may only market a “medium” variety, but the expectation is that you understand medium compares against a more general case of mild = no heat and *hot *= very spicy. It seems reasonable.
The drink size is using a similar projection, with the caveat that drink sizes aren’t as standardized. I’ve seen 20 oz cups be small, medium, or large size depending upon the venue. This is more of a case of marketing over semantic content. People are much more likely to buy a “medium” sized cup than a “small” sized cup, even if the cups are otherwise identical.
Then there’s Firehouse Subs, which offers sandwiches: “choose Medium or Large”.
Firehouse Subs (pdf file)
They mean 8 inch or 12 inch. Many places use the option of “regular” instead of “medium”, which is more sensible. I suppose in marketing jargon, they might argue that suggests one should order the one size instead of the other size, and so avoid that terminology. I don’t know.
Oh, just that there are general grammatical “rules” that we use natively that we don’t even notice or might not be formally taught in school, and when you teach EFL you learn some of them. Like I don’t recall ever being taught how to create comparatives and superlatives in English, but there is a general rule governing how they’re made based on syllable count and the structure of the word. Similarly, I don’t remember ever learning about all those conditional forms in my English lessons, but I natively use them, and when you’re teaching English, you learn there’s four basic conditional forms that follow a certain and convey different meanings.