[QUOTE=SmackFu]
Is affect/effect really a necessary distinction? Are there sentences where you could use both, and which one you choose changes the meaning?
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Well, if you’re going to effect a change, then you probably don’t want others to affect it.
[QUOTE=SmackFu]
Is affect/effect really a necessary distinction? Are there sentences where you could use both, and which one you choose changes the meaning?
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No, they are two distinct words with separate applications.
Pedants who complain about common usage shifting meanings, often because non-professionals use words “incorrectly”, tend also to think that language descriptivists say that anything goes and that anything anybody does must be right.
It’s nowhere near that simple. First, there are numerous levels to language. Grammar, spelling, meanings, usage. Grammar tends to stay fairly fixed and changes only slowly over time. Spelling was mostly fixed in the 19th century after dictionaries and spelling books became common and public education made the teaching of “rules” a necessary part of learning.
Meaning and usage are far more slippery. Virtually every common English word has accrued additional - often many additional - meanings over the centuries. If you ever see someone in a language thread protest that a word “originally” meant something, they have lost the argument. (If you ever see someone complain you can’t use a plural like “they” with a singular like “someone”, they have lost the argument.) Complaints about the breakdown of the English language can be found from literally any year in the past several hundred. They are all nonsense. The English language is better than it ever could have been imagined in the past.
So what about words like affect and effect or the use of apostrophes in plurals. Do we have to accept them and approve of them?
What perplexes the pedants is that the answer is still no. The English language does not have an official body that monitors and attempts to control it. What it does have are large numbers of good writers who set boundaries for what good language is.
It is trivially easy to find good writers - i.e., professionals in serious work: newspapers, magazines, books, journals - who use enormity to mean large in size. That is probably the most common usage in print today.
You will almost never see a good writer use affect when effect is meant. You will virtually never see a good writer use an apostrophe in a plural.
The English language can be divided into use by good writers and use by poor writers. It isn’t difficult to tell which side of the divide most people are on. (The border is fuzzy, as borders always are.) Not every good writer writes flawless prose, whatever flawless might mean. Not every poor writer produces illiterate sludge every sentence. The totality of the writing - the context, again - normally makes the distinction easy for everyone to see. Even poor writers can tell what good writing is, whether they can do it or not.
The American Heritage dictionary made news when it first appeared by polling a couple of hundred writers on their views of whether certain terms or usages were acceptable. The real lesson of the results didn’t lie in what percent approved what, but that virtually every one of them had a different list of acceptability. When they were re-polled for later editions, most usages became more accepted (a few went the other way). No two good writers, experienced professional authorities, will agree on what is acceptable or what is proper, even as a time-limited snapshot of the language. Moreover, the language is changing faster than at any recorded period.
There’s nothing wrong with asking about usages or what usage to use or how to improve one’s writing by tilting it toward what is considered good writing. The problem comes only when people want an answer, one definitive “do it this way” answer of the sort that lazy elementary school teachers give. Only pedants will provide definitive answers, which is why pedants are so scorned by those who better understand how English works.
You can no more give an answer to this question than to the question, “how do you hit a golf ball”? You hit a golf ball by having a good fundamental swing and adapting it to the situation you find yourself in. You write English the same way. Finesse and feel, not rules. That’s not the answer that people want to hear, but it’s the only one available.
Neither does the word “duplicity” mean duplication.
[QUOTE=Celyn]
I think Lynne Truss happened to choose a bad example there, as the attacks could be said to be very big in scope AND quite outrageously bad.
(Eek, it feel sort of unholy, somehow, to find myself saying something negative about Lynne Truss)
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And I could never say anything good about her. She knows nothing about what she purports to write about. I opened the book to a page at random and saw quite clearly that she got something wrong and didn’t even bother to take two minutes to research her assertion.
Truss is just an old fart whining that in her day, everyone spoke correctly. What she really means is that in her school, she learned the lessons from uninformed teachers and refused to actually study the situation.
The mistake with “enormity” is just another error that Truss committs. And her book is useless as a guide to anything (try looking something up if you have a question).
Use Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Transitive Vampire if you want the opinions of someone who has some clue to her subject – and it’s more entertaining to read, to boot.
[QUOTE=Kendall Jackson]
This is completely incorrect on almost every particular.
Enormity has been used to mean “enormousness” for more than two centuries. The first relevant citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary, under “excess in magnitude, hugeness, vastness”, comes from 1792. This meaning is corroborated by both Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary. If your dictionary does not have this definition, then your dictionary sucks. Further, this is not a problem of it being “an archaic usage” - the sense of “hugeness” is a newer definition of the word, not an older definition. Speakers logically extrapolated from the adjective enormous which had previously undergone a similar change in meaning.
And though the American Heritage has the definition noted as a “Usage Problem”, that doesn’t mean anything beyond the fact that some people complain about it. Yes, some pedants consider this extension in meaning unfortunate, but our language is what it is, regardless of what people would like it to be.
Even more bizarre is your assertion that words have “official” meanings. I don’t want to speak for esoteric areas such as government or the law, but words as they’re commonly spoken and written don’t “officially” mean a damn thing. They’re spoken and then they’re understood, or they’re spoken and then they’re not understood. Generally we prefer the former to the latter, and maybe there was once a problem with enormity, but if people are still confused after two hundred years, then that’s their problem. The word goes merrily forth entirely unconcerned.
The language is what people say, and what people say changes constantly. I don’t hold it against writers who want to adhere to the older senses of the word in order to avoid jarring readers, but it’s still incredibly silly for pedants to become outraged about changes in the system when in fact the system quite literally never stops changing.
The best way to cope with language isn’t daily rituals of scorn and derision. When dealing with a system that doesn’t sit still, it’s far better to develop an aesthetic founded on the beauty of evolution.
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I didn’t mean to say words have absolutely 100% correct definitions. I should’ve said that it was the “official” (quotes signifying sarcasm of course) usage, as I usually do in these matters. Also, I’ve never heard enormity used as enormousness I literally found that out after searching a bit after reading the OP. I’ve always heard it used as “an outrageous atrocity.” I didn’t even know it could mean enormousness until I saw a bunch of hits using it as such, different places and crowds I guess.
And my dictionary is from 1970-something and my online sources were from reference.com so take what you will from that (yes they really aren’t that good but they’re usually accurate).
Also, I really didn’t mean to scorn the change I was simply pointing out what I found with a little bit of my typical usage and knowlege. I’m the first person to jump in and argue that “amusing” words (i.e. internet slang such as woot) entering actual bonafide dictionaries is a good thing and not contributing to the “derision of our culture” or somesuch and I accept things such as “gay means homosexual now you twat… deal with it” I’m not about to argue issues as rock solid as societal evolution.