@ Guizot but many people do. I’ve been "corrected’’ before for saying “gonna”. People nitpick sometimes and it can make other people feel stupid. I don’t like it at all. I went on a date the other day and the guy said, “It’s whom, not who,” while I was speaking!! I know it’s whom, but I think that word sounds too uptight for me. Anyway, it pissed me off because this guy doesn’t even realize that I’m smarter than him. I don’t judge others, but I’m definitely sensitive to being judged.
In a lot of cases, the way things are written doesn’t really matter, but if you’re working in a profession where it does, it can mean a lot to a lot of people. My boss won’t even let my coworker do anymore public speaking because her grammar/spelling is so bad. I feel bad for her because her speeches are so much better than mine and she’s ostracized because “it makes the company look weak”. It’s ridiculous.
Except how often do you actually hear someone saying “My digestive track is acting up”?
If they really were an ignorant hillbilly like you believe them to be, they’d say “guts”, or "bowels"or some other rude anglo-saxon word.
And I guarantee that if you’re listening to the radio and a scientist says “We studied the digestive tracts of several species of antelope…” if you isolated the word “tracts” you’d find that the “t” was not actually pronounced, or at most pronounced as a slight stop.
If you study how people actually speak you’ll find that they substitute or remove phonemes all the time. How do you pronounce a word like “water”? Go around the english-speaking planet and record people saying that word, and you’ll find a hundred different ways of saying that word. I’d bet you actually say “wader” every day, rather than “water”. It’s just that “d” and “t” extremely closely related sounds, substitution of one for the other is extremely common. This is how we get Odin, Oðinn and Wotan as spellings for the same mythological figure.
About ten years ago, I was dictating something to someone. I don’t recall the circumstance, but this person was a high school graduate, possibly a college graduate. I enunciated every word very clearly and deliberately, to avoid confusion, and to make it easier for him.
When I was done, I looked at what had been written. It was perfect, except every time I said “the”, he had written “thee”. I guess I had enunciated the words a bit too deliberately.
Yes, because the way we spell the word “facts” in English is “facts”, despite the fact that we don’t usually pronounce it that way. Just like we spell “knight” K-N-I-G-H-T but we don’t pronounce it “kuh-nicht” like they did back in the old days. All those random gh’s strewn through various words used to be pronounced like the the german “ch”.
English has a standard orthography (or rather two, if we count those quaint people in Britain). If we actually spelled things how we pronounce them in our own idiolect it would make written communication much more difficult. Once you get past grade school you don’t read words by sounding them out, you read words as a unit. If I sometimes spelled “water” as wadder or wattuh or wa’a depending on my idiolect it would take forever to read. Standardized spelling helps tremendously. Take a look at middle English like Chaucer, and it’s really hard to read. But re-write it using modern spelling but keeping the words exactly the same and it’s suddenly easy even though the word choice is a bit odd.
I went on a date the other day and the guy said, “It’s whom, not who,” while I was speaking!!
I had a similar experience recently. It wasn’t a date, but it was a conversation with an a-hole who was asking me for a favor! My response to his interruption was, “I really don’t appreciate you being rude to me and interrupting me while I’m speaking. You can apologize for being rude to me and keep your petty grammar comments to yourself, or we’re done here.”
“But whom is correct and who is not.”
“I’m sorry that your mother didn’t care enough about you to teach you manners, but it’s not my problem. Please leave me alone”
“But I need you to fix my computer.”
“Fuck off.”
I have no patience for people so insecure that they have to “prove” their superiority.
I have no objection to the way you handled that, but my style would have been to say, “I will try to improve my grammar if you try to improve your manners. Do we have a deal?”
Wow. People actually still correct that one? I simply refuse to use the word “whom” in casual conversation. Only if I’m intending to speak in a formal voice will I use it–it’s not a part of casual speech where I’m from, nor, it seems, where any of my friends are from. Seriously, even the most literary types I know do not use “whom” in casual speech. And I get amused when I hear over-corrections where people use “whom” where the subjective case “who” is called for.
