True, of course, for any language, not just English.
For example, in Luxembourgish, if you’re working on a project or pursuing an objective of some kind, you might hear someone say: Maach dass d’Kierch am Duerf bleift. Literally, “make sure the church stays in the village.”
See if you can guess what that means before expanding below:
explanation
The sense of this is, “don’t go overboard,” or “stay focused on what’s necessary,” or some such. You can clean up the village, but don’t do it so aggressively that you literally remove the church. Basically, it’s a warning against scope creep.
Five points if your guess came anywhere near that meaning.
I’m not clear either. But some say there is a distinction. If you Google “more than vs over” you will come up with a lot of sites offering advice. Many say that either is fine, but some claim that there are times when you should prefer one over the other (heh).
Oh good, that means I’m more likely than you to win the 2025 “language pedant of the year” award.
I’m not sure what your point is. If it’s that language changes over time, it would be foolish and pointless to argue otherwise. What I viscerally dislike is language that is fundamentally illogical, for the reasons I already stated.
As for Wodehouse and “bimbo”, it’s historically a masculine word and has come into use only within the last 25 years or so to mean the archetypal “dumb blonde”. Wodehouse also wrote about now-outdated cultures where everyone and their dog had a houseful of servants. He even used the archiac word “knut” in reference to the independently wealthy young man of the aristocratic classes, typified by Bertie Wooster, who never had to work for a living and spent their leisure time in gentleman’s clubs, fine restaurants, and getting into trouble.
But archaic terminology or not, Wodehouse knew how to write. He was a master of language and gentle comedy. When he wrote about a forlorn lover who threw all the memorabilia of his former love into the ocean, to be forever forgotten, and a large hairy dog quickly swam after it and came back and deposited the package at his feet, looking up at him “with a look of genial imbecility”, he was writing as only Wodehouse could. Likewise with another ardent suitor who kept writing and re-writing love poems to his beloved, throwing them into the wastepaper basket, to which he accidentally set fire. Which resulted in many interesting consequences, the most amusing of which was “the acrid smell of burnt poetry”.
I did think it would be something like “keep things under control”, but you gave it away in your set up. Obviously an idiom related to “working on a project or pursuing an objective of some kind” wasn’t going to be about moving a church.
My mother was an old-fashioned journalist (newspaper, radio, magazine) and had a job as a proofreader for the local newspaper into her late 80s. The two nits that drove her pickin’ crazy were:
“Healthy” versus “healthful.”
“Most unique” or “very unique,” instead of “unique.”
My sibs and I would deliberately insert these nits into our conversations just to try to get a rise out of her.
But…I only, after the fact, noticed that I used the word ‘among’ without thinking about it in my post ^ there: “Using “between” as a choice among more than two items does not set my teeth on edge…”.
So, despite the fact that I may not mind the usage of ‘between’ applied to more than two items, I don’t stoop to actually use it myself. I may still be in the running for the award…
If “unique” is to have useful meaning at all, then it must be a relative term. Consider a fruit basket containing six apples and one orange. Which fruit in the basket is the unique one? If one takes an absolutist view of “unique”, then they all are, since no two apples (nor any two of any macroscopic object) are precisely identical. And an adjective which applies to every object in the Universe is not a useful adjective. But even though every piece of fruit in that basket is absolutely unique, clearly, the orange is more unique than the apples.
Nice try at a nit, but she still would have picked it. Her frustration was trebled because she had to deal with a lot of writers (especially sports writers) who pushed every one of her buttons every single edition.
OK, it’s been quite a while since I read “Frankenstein.” So why would Vic be considered a “monster?” Creepy, even loathsome, having people scrounge up body parts and tissue. And he did dispatch “Adam’s” mate before he had animated her. So, he had his negatives, but “monster” seems a little strong.
Also, the less/fewer thing is, IMO, silly in the same sort of way that it’s silly when people assert that answers must match the form of the question - such as the notion that: “have you visited the moon?” may only be answered “I have” or “I have not”.
“I am not interested in the moon”
“I wouldn’t go there if you paid me”
“The moon doesn’t exist”
“in fact, I plan to blow up that luminous bastard”
Are all valid (if not all truthful) answers that do not match the form of the question
By playing a god, a modern Prometheus one might say, his hubris took control over his common sense. He never stopped to consider the ethics of what he was doing. Then, once he was successful, he suddenly became horrified, and abandoned his creature to its own fate, thus setting in motion all of the horror that followed. Both his initial loathsome actions, and his complete abdication of responsibility for their aftermath, marks him as being as much (if not more) of a monster as his creation.
Agreed. @Chronos is really…what’s the term? Well, let’s say one of a kind.
Yeah. When written, “playing god” was a pretty monstrous idea no matter what was created.
IMO it’s really problematic to use the term “monster” in the sense of “amoral evil” in a context that also contains a reanimated man-beast composed of dead body parts.
Holy potential misattribution Batman!
A mad scientist can be a monster. A Godzilla or a zombie or an assembled cadaver lego kit can be a monster. But they’re different kinds of monsters and English has enough words we don’t need to use the same term for both. In the same book / movie.
Again, his creation literally murdered a child. Not accidentally, or because he didn’t understand what he was doing. He plotted and committed first degree murder against a six year old because he was angry at the kid’s older brother.
Victor’s not in the same ballpark as his creation, morally speaking. He’s not even in the same zip code.
Worth noting, as well, that the whole “stitched together from body parts stolen from graveyards” is entirely an invention of the movies. The book doesn’t say anything about robbing graves, and is very light on the details of exactly what he was doing when he made the creature but there’s no mention of reusing human corpses.
