Or, horrors, that he cooked one!
Yeah, and he wore *a napron * while he did it, too.
Why not?
Why should the plural of “dish” always be dishes, but the plural of “fish” can be “fish”? It’s just a one letter difference.
True. Nooses : Moose. I get it. But dish, fish, noose and moose are different words. Mail and email are basically the same word with the same meaning with the exception of the modifying ‘e’. Ergo, they should follow the same rules.
I know I can’t possibly win this battle. English is a goofy language. Nevertheless, it’s one of those things that makes me wince when I hear it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I propose a new law:
Whenever a poster starts a thread to rant about a neologism, another poster will *always * turn up with a cite that the word has been in use for a very long time.
I think there’s a nuance you may be missing. It’s not just “use”, in context. While not a great fan of the term, I do occasionally use it, because there’s a much more specific meaning to it - when I use it in business, it means “use [the subject] to capitalise on effort/investment already undertaken (with the implication that this will save duplication of effort or expenditure and thus maximise return-on-investment)”. Which is a bit wordy, so “leverage” will do.
I think you overestimate this “standard.” There are loads of words in English that serve as both count and non-count nouns in varying contexts.
Yes. But synonymous doesn’t mean “having exactly the same connotation.” It means “having a similar meaning.” 100% synonymous, by definition, is meaningless.
Many linguist believe that a language doesn’t hold onto two different words with the same meaning unless there’s a reason (a useful difference in connotation). This assumes that language is used “naturally”–without affectation. English has a pretty large lexicon because England was the site of several invasions, and then the English colonized a lot. (And then the U.S. expanded to the Pacific, taking up some Native American and Spanish words.) New words usually arise naturally with new contexts.
What’s bothering the OP, I think, is that the use of architect as a verb is affected. People just say it in order to sound more important. (Which I too find annoying.) But apparently, they do this only in certain communities. In that case, it will probably become argot in a while. You can think of it as slang.
Mistakes with it’s/its are everywhere that people write English, and probably always will be. It’s not a question of intelligence–it’s just a punctuation error, often simply made in haste. If things like that really bother you that much, you’ll probably be crazy in a few years. (And a whole lot of other SDMB members who seem to complain about it every month or so.)
“Architected” is annoying, whether or not the word has precedent. My personal tech-term bête noire, however, is “premise,” as in “customer premise equipment.” (Premise is a presupposed proposition in an argument; the plural word premises is used to refer to a location, even a single one).
I’ve all but given up the battle, though; the misuse is so ubiquitous that I’m confident the dictionaries will soon be updated to cite “premise” as a valid alternative to refer to a single place. Probably accompanied by an italicized note explaining that the usage is still considered “controversial” by a happily dwindling number of pathetic, anal-retentive prescriptivist killjoys.
I wonder what percentage of these word rant threads end up this way. You know, within 2 posts it’s pointed out that the hated word is a real word in long usage. I understand the hate but imagine if the clothing fashion hate threads did the same thing as these word fashion hate threads. “Fucking Crocs! They aren’t even real shoes!”
Architexturalized
Since we’re bitching about words going into different grammatical paradigms than we want them to:
There’s a good reason we should treat words like they’re in the dominant paradigm. Seriously. If we called them ‘vertebras’ the yoga teacher would not have been telling me to roll my back down “one vertebrae at a time”, forcing me to get very angry.
So count me as pro-‘emails’.
All of them( see my previous post)?
First, it’s not a “battle”. The legions of prescriptive folks, whose bookish habits put them much closer to libraries than war grounds, love their fighting metaphors, and it’s ridiculous every time they use them.* They gird themselves for these fights with pens and paper, and lately with keyboards and electrons, and not ever with machine guns and grenades. The self-martyrdom that comes with their inevitable “losses” is equally annoying. If they actually behaved more like real soldiers and keeled over dead in a trench when they lost a battle, I’d cut them more slack. At least we wouldn’t have to hear them whine afterward about their defeat.
Second, English does not have some monopoly on goofiness. Our language has an interesting history that has gifted it with an incomparable vocabulary, but every living language on earth is subject to change with time. I promise you that the Germans and Japanese I’ve talked with bitch just as much about the youngest generation of speakers (the Germans especially have it in for the Turkish youths) who aren’t adhering to their older notions of their Holy Mother Tongue.
Third, I wince a lot at other people’s language, too. I’m a teacher, so it’s a near daily thing for me. And some of the things I wince at are actual, real, honest-to-God mistakes, that it is say, constructions that are not correct in any dialect spoken on this earth. These I correct, and then move on.
But when I get an email from a student with “lol” in it, as much as I want to grind my teeth, I just have to get a grip on some perspective and accept it. Getting upset at that near illiterate, lazy, snot-nosed brat who shouldn’t even graduated from high school, let alone be accepted to university… well, obviously the problem is my own irrationality, and not the student who was using a convenient shorthand to express amusement in a medium entirely devoid of facial expression and tone of voice. That mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging bafoon- excuse me, that young individual is simply taking advantage of the new linguistic tools available to him, and who am I to blame him for his abject stupidi- for his innovative lexical choices?
My dentist recommends that I buy a football mouthguard to protect my molars when I sleep at night, but I might get a second as protection when I’m reading anything written by my students.
The simple fact is that if I’m expecting a student to use a slightly more formal register when emailing the person directly responsible for his grade, I’m obviously expecting too much. As long as the student performs sufficiently in real graded exercises, laid out in the syllabus, then receiving a “lol” in an email is utterly irrelevant, no matter how much it might bother me.
I wince, but the problem is with me and my dentist, not with the student, no matter how idioti- innovative he might be.
- My objection here, just to be clear, isn’t that their English is wrong when they use this particular sort of metaphor. I just find their self-importance, as if they are waging a war for civilization itself, tedious.
Sheesh. I must have been misinformed that a battle is any conflict (of unspecified severity); those that employ the use of guns and grenades notwithstanding. But you’re the teacher. I just take calls and email for a living.
I guess you win this battle of wits?
May I suggest a glass of wine? I find it to be quite effective in dulling the propensity to gnash one’s teeth. Can’t say whether it cures wincing, however.
This is a very good point. Just about every language is “goofy” in one way or another. And it’s not just because of “younger” generations. Language is goofy by nature.