I will say that there have been numerous times where I’ve been annoyed by someone assuming context for a question I’ve asked, because I took care to ask the question that I actually wanted an answer to. Like one time at a job, when I asked if anyone was doing a certain task, because it was a task that was necessary. My supervisor sent me off to do it, where I discovered that it was in fact already done, and that my supervisor knew it. She had assumed that my question was actually that I was looking for something to do to make myself feel useful, when an answer of “That’s been taken care of” would have been perfectly acceptable.
On the question of certain modern idiomatic usages: I dislike things like “I could care less”, and avoid using them myself, but I tolerate them, but the one singular usage for which I have very little tolerance is misuse of “literally”. So long as the word “literally” remains intact, nearly any other usage can be tolerated, because if there’s ever any ambiguity, it can be clarified by asking the person whether they meant it literally. But when “literally” itself is used non-literally, how does one convey that?
Context. I’ve literally never been confused in conversation whether “literally” was being used as an intensifier or to signify something done in a literal manner. Like literally never. Hell, my head will literally explode if you can’t figure out which “literally”s are being meant literally in these sentences and which are not. There is one example in writing I’ve come across where it was somewhat ambiguous, though I was pretty sure I had the correct meaning in mind. This is one outlier in hundreds if not thousands of usages.
The usage is overdone, and I don’t use it all that much, although I confess if I learn that it irks someone, I use it more than I naturally would.
Agree. It’s annoying only because it is the over-used filler/intensifier of the moment, but that moment will pass (I think it has already peaked) and some other thing will come along to annoy the people who get annoyed about this sort of thing.
Language is just a collection of grunts and squeaks and hisses that we make to try to transfer thoughts from one brain to another; it is not composed of pure logic - it does sometimes contain logic, but it is, quite stubbornly defiant about being bound by its own logic.
“Literally” has been used non-literally for longer than the US has existed. The fact that we’re still having this argument today is pretty good evidence that using “literally” non-literally hasn’t done any damage to its literal meaning.
I’ve always thought this is an interesting nitpick.
Which is correct, A or B?
A) His being seen is all that matters to him.
B) Him being seen is all that matterfs to him.
The correct answer is A because being seen is a gerund phrase functioning as a noun, the subject of the sentence. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that. I don’t even say it, although when I write I use the “correct” choice.
Sadly true, but the key adjective that is implied here is natural language. Computer languages have a rigorously consistent logical structure. Why do natural human language lack that? Perhaps at least in part because the “evolution” of human language is often the result of illogical negative influences like mishearing, lack of understanding, lack of appreciation of basic rules of grammar, eggcorns, and other deleterious factors. Look the illustration in the wiki article on eggcorns, where a restaurant offering a prix fixe menu is advertising it as a “Pre-fixed” 3-course dinner. Is this an advancement in human communication? To be sure, language also advances through the creativity of brilliant writers, but that’s extremely rare compared to those other factors.
I don’t know what the “battle” has ever been about, but this is not my battle. Again, for about the third time, I have no quarrel with “literally” being used to introduce a metaphor, I have a quarrel with bad metaphors, which are made all the worse when intensified by “literally”. The argument is not about the non-literal use of “literally”, but fundamentally about the inelegance and ugliness that results from the incompetent and careless use of terrible metaphors.
You have a good sense of language. A great many people don’t, and this is the problem I was alluding to in the first paragraph in this response. I would also always use “A”, and @Monty’s explanation is basically correct. Consider a sentence with a gerund like “swimming”:
“My swimming in the pool every morning has made me a stronger swimmer”. Anyone who would say “Me swimming in the pool every morning …” could be expected to follow that with something like “And now me go for dinner. You come? Bring Jane. Me want meet!”
.
Heh. That’s pretty funny. Similar processes gave us “lone” and “newscopter.”
I saw a funny misunderstanding in Stephen Levy’s “Hackers” - Levy claims that someone described a programming challenges as being “the pawn’s ass” - but what the guy probably said was “pons asinorum.”
Because computer languages are purposely designed to provide the exact instructions that computers require. It’s a rule-based domain.
Human communication is way more complex and has to work in a much messier domain, and importantly, had to invent itself.
Some of the illogical things that people sometimes complain about in human language are probably features not bugs - like redundancy - which might seem wasteful but is useful for avoiding repetition and also conveying emotion - and proliferation of synonyms (which allow for subtle variations of meaning). Its not a rule-based domain - the rules of grammar etc are emergent properties of language.
It’s a noun made out of a verb - in English usually by the letters “-ing” at the end. “I swim very well” uses swim as a verb while “My swimming is awesome” using the noun (gerund form of the verb) swimming
Yes. Linguists document the grammar of a language new to them by listening to what the people do, and writing down the patterns. Children learn a language by listening to what the people around them do, and doing the same thing, as best they can, without explicitly learning rules that they could recite (in a very few modern cultures, years after they’ve learned the language, they are taught a few of the rules explicitly - usually the rules of a particular dialect that’s currently being used by the powerful folks in their area, but even then, they don’t explicitly get taught all the rules, because a) the rules are very complicated, b) the rules are not all documented, and c) the rules change)
Not disagreeing with you, except maybe that I wouldn’t say that natural language is “way more complex” than some computer languages, just way messier, hence much more difficult to disentangle the rules, non-rules, and oddball exceptions to the rules. The messiness arises from the lack of – to use an engineering term – a “design center”. This may well be inevitable, but to a technologist like myself, it’s regrettable. This is my foundational objection to phrases like “I could care less”. As Spock might have said, “it does not compute”.
How do you feel about “belittle” - the diabolic word that so confused the British of the 18th century that one reported that he could not fathom what it could possibly mean?
Lucky you, then. Or unlucky me. I’ve encountered multiple instances where I couldn’t tell, as well as at least one instance where I was the speaker and wanted to emphasize that something really was literally true, and wasn’t sure how to convey that, because it would have sounded from the context like it was an exaggeration.
That doesn’t completely parallel the “his being seen” example, though, because your swimming is active, but his being seen is passive. In “his being seen”, he’s the object of the verb “see”, and so it might make sense to use the accusative form of the pronoun.
You could try to make that case, but I don’t think it would get far. “Being seen” is a noun phrase, and specifically a gerund phrase. I don’t think that having some component of the phrase being derived from a verb that would normally demand the accusative (objective) case is of any relevance; you have to consisder the phrase as a whole, which as a noun phrase demands that the referencing pronoun take the possessive case, just like in “my swimming in the pool …” (where I guess technically “my” is a possessive determiner).
