Preach it, brother. I hate going to the mall/WalMart/grocery store and people decide that the perfect place for a 30 minutes conversation is in the middle of the damned road!
Other peeves:
~ “Literally” is a real word, not something used to emphasize other words. When you say you literally hit the roof, this means that you climbed up a ladder and whaled away with a hammer.
~ “Unique” is not a comparative. Nothing can be more or less unique than something else. It either is or it isn’t. Please stop using it if you don’t know what it means.
~ This goes for “identical,” too.
~ Oh, and please stop touching my monitor when you point things out.
I hear you. I know kids have been rebelling against their parents since the beginning of time, and I’m sure my parents felt the same way about our bell-bottoms, tie-dyed shirts and long hair, but CAN’T. YOU. SEE. HOW. STUPID. YOU. LOOK?
Standard? I have seen that signage precisely once - I forget where, exactly, but I think it was Thailand. I had to go elsewhere because I didn’t have a clue which was which. I just had to Google, and discovered that circle=Ladies, triangle=Gents, which is the opposite to what I would have guessed, based on the “triangular” shape of the woman’s dress in the “universal pictogram”.
Seriously, are these things used much in the US? I don’t recall seeing them when I was there.
It’s just a way of indicating the schwa sound without resorting to symbols. Perhaps “captun” or “curtun” would be more to your liking? Anyway, I used the John Walker quote only to demonstrate that this is a normal pronunciation going back to at least the 1700s.
It’s like the way that the word “for” is lightened to something akin to “fur” when not stressed. It’s just a part of the English language that when a syllable or a word isn’t stressed it’s going to generally become lightened.
And I have to highly recommend the Charles Harrington Elster book to other word freaks like me. You may not agree with him about every word he discusses (for example, I disagree with him about guillotine) but you will appreciate why he comes to his conclusions.
Me, I hate it when people think that words have more in common with bones dug up by archeologists than with music created by artists. I can’t stand it when people think the pronunciation and meaning of words is discovered, like the modified theory of relativity, instead of invented, like The Iliad. Makes me inflobbicatedly pissed off.
I agree with you about “literally” being misused, because it actually destroys the word. If someone says they were “literally beat black and blue”, you don’t know whether they mean it or not. The originally meaning, which was useful, has been lost.
However, people putting non-precise modifiers in front of words like “unique” or “identical” can add shades of meaning, but doesn’t render the word useless.
(Besides, John Smith might be unique among residents of New York City in that he can do some particular thing, whereas Joe Smith is unique among Americans in that he can do some more unusual particular thing. Thus, Joe Smith is more unique than John Smith.)
Everytime I go to the pet store, they have a shelf label for the large economy size of aspen guinea pig litter, but it is never on the shelf. The large size is so large that the shelf only has room for two packages, so every time I have to ask if there are any more in back (I can’t imagine they only get 2 at a time). I stand around while they go look. Finally they come back and say they don’t have it.
I’m starting to suspect that the shelf label is all a ruse to get me to come into the store and buy the smaller more expensive bag, so as not to have wasted the trip.
Well it makes sense in a way. Women tend to be curvier and men tend to be more angular**, so the women get the circle and the men get the triangle. Usually, within the triangle or circle there is also the pictogram of a figure wearing trousers or a dress, respectively. But in other contexts the circle and square, together, may be used without the figures to mean “public restrooms”. You see this on visitors’ guides to museums, amusement parks, and so on.
I first noticed these signs in 1984.
** Not that I haven’t known many angular women and round men!
I don’t follow you here. Language is a natural phenomenon. Some words may be invented to meet a specific need, but the nut-and-bolt words of a language do indeed just “happen”, and in that respect are like bones dug up by an archaeologist. If you don’t believe me, then tell me who invented “window”, “house”, and “barking”.
I answer the phones at work. There is one particular lady here who gets a lot of personal phone calls, and also does a lot of in-person socializing in various departments, with the result that when I call about something work-related, she’s hardly ever available. This morning her seven year old son called. I couldn’t locate her. A few minutes later he called back, I still couldn’t locate her, and I told him I’d let her know he’d called. Well, it was a busy morning, and sure enough, I forgot to repeatedly call the woman’s number to try and let her know.
She comes up to me later, and she’s upset that I didn’t pass her message. Turns out, the seven year old was calling from our parking lot. She had left him in the car so she could do a little work before taking him to daycare (did I mention she takes off work a lot?) and the kid had set off the car alarm and was freaking out.
Now, I’m terribly sorry the kid was upset. He’s a nice polite little boy, and I was wrong to forget that he had called. But lady, maybe if anybody could ever find your ass, these things wouldn’t happen! And you left him in the car??? Stupid bitch!
I don’t need to tell you who invented “window,” house," and “barking”: you admit that someone did.
It is true that language is not invented in the same way that the light bulb was invented; it does change over time, as people make their own changes to it, but those changes are often inadvertant.
My point is that there’s no such thing as “incorrect” language: people incorrectly call changes to the language incorrect, when really they’re just changes.
There is such a thing as standard American English–I like to call it bourgeoinics–but it has no intrinsic value over any other version of English, any more than Beethoven has intrinsic value over Duke Ellington.
When people refer to an unusual pronunciation as incorrect, or a common word usage as incorrect, it demonstrates a fundamental misapprehension about the nature of language, and it bunches my knickers.
But it’s not the same thing. Walker is suggesting that the “a” is dropped, leaving the “i” sound:
That’s just not true. We don’t drop the “a” in captain and leave the “i”, we substitute the schwa sound for the “ai” vowel blend. Walker is simply incorrect. The short ‘i’ sound is not equivalent to the schwa sound. And it’s not at all analagous to the pronunciation of Sunday, Monday… Captain and curtain end in a consonant. I can’t think of any words that end in a schwa sound, without a final consonant. I don’t even know if that’s possible.
But all the examples you have chosen are words that end in a consonant. With Sunday, Monday… it ends in a vowel sound, and saying Sundee, Mondee… is simply substiting the long ‘e’ sound for the long ‘a’ sound. There is no difference in the amount of stress put on the syllable. In the 1700s, did people seperate out the component sounds of the long ‘a’ sound, like aaa-eee? Maybe they did, but we sure don’t do that now. It’s just one sound.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘normal’, but it’s not correct. It’s a pet peeve of mine because there’s no logic to that pronunciation. I understand that when vowel sounds are unstressed, we often swallow them. But when you say “Mondee”, you’re not swallowing the long ‘a’ sound, you’re just changing it to a long ‘e’ sound. I mean, I see where you’re coming from, and maybe that explains the origin of the practice, but it doesn’t make it correct, nor any less annoying.
You got lucky when you pegged him as a Pennsylvanian, for the “Mondee, Tuesdee, etc.” pronunciation occurs places besides that. My father says that too, and his immediate forbears came from Kansas and Utah.
Yeah, but on the other hand, it bunches my pantaloons when people adopt the “anything goes” approach to language, and say that it’s impossible to be wrong. So words like “libary”, “nucular”, “aight”, and sentences like “Uh muh guh, he was all like, whatever.” or “I be gonna axe her who da arthur o dat book be, knowwhati’msayin.”, or “You wanna steam rice or fry rice?” become perfectly acceptable.
When someone says “nucular,” “libary,” and “aight,” do you know what they mean?
If so, their language is performing its primary function: it’s communicating. To the extent that you stop to correct them or complain about it, you’re the one decreasing the efficiency of language, not them.
Now, a secondary function of language is aesthetic, and I’ve got no beef with your saying that “nucular” sounds fugly to you. Hell, it sounds fugly to me, too. But that’s a far cry from saying that it’s “incorrect.” It ain’t incorrect; it’s just fugly.
Keep in mind that if you end your participles in a “g,” there’s gonna be people who find your speech patterns pretentious and silly, and their aesthetic judgments are every bit as valid as yours are. Beauty isn’t only in your eye.
Some of your example sentences were difficult to understand. To the extent that a person has trouble getting their audience to understand them, whether it’s the fault of the audience or the speaker, their language is failing in its primary purpose. In this sense, it is “incorrect” (although I prefer “inefficient”) both to speak the Queen’s English to a group of very rural Appalachians, and to speak in deep Southern dialect to the Queen.
I admit nothing of the sort. Since you seem to think they were invented, you do need to tell me by whom, or at least when.
I don’t know where to begin here. Language may change, but some distinctions of definition and usage are worth keeping because they perform a practical function. Flout and flaunt may now be considered interchangeable, but the cost is that part of the expressive power of both words has been lost. Or take comprise as another example. Its correct definition is include, take in, and not compose. Yet people now use composed of and comprised of interchangeably. The cost to the expressive power of the language is significant. That’s why people get their knickers in a twist about this stuff.
Then there are grammatical errors that are wrong in a deep, Chomskyan sense. Regarding English, some foreign members here have said that learning how to use the articles was difficult for them. For instance, Mandarin Chinese doesn’t have articles, and so many Chinese people learning English just omit them. But just because many of them do it doesn’t make it right. I’ll concede a point and agree with you that such niceties as who and whom are superfluous, but there are other aspects of grammar that make up an essential part of the language’s system, and need to be observed if we are to understand each other. For instance, in American English They insisted that he is there has a different meaning from They insisted that he be there, and so it’s useful to know when to use the present subjunctive and when not to.
become perfectly acceptable.