Incidentally, I really hate that the UK expression for when someone is feeling sick is "poorly".
It's got the "ly" ending which is one of the clear signs of an adverb, and in other contexts it is used as an adverb. But, for some reason the British have turned it into an adjective meaning sick. Sometimes they use it in a way where it can be seen as an adverb: "He's feeling poorly", in which case it seems to be modifying "feeling". In the North American dialect you could substitute the adjective "sick": "He's feeling sick". But, other times they say "She won't be coming in today, she's poorly". What is the adverb modifying there, "is"?
Some flat adverbs sound perfectly natural to most speakers, like "play nice" or "drive safe". Others have less acceptability among people in general, like "That tastes real good."
There's that old line that if my aunt had wheels she'd be a bicycle. Maybe the command form is muddling the topic here, but using the be-verb with an adjective like that attaches a subject complement, essentially describing the subject. But "I am fast" describing a person doesn't mean that saying "I drive fast" is describing a drive as a noun.
I'm gonna get the shit downvoted out of me for this, but the problem with this idea is that insular communities tend to redefine words and then expect everyone outside their bubble to know their new definition. Doing so also robs the language of a word that served a specific purpose, such as in the case of the word "literally."
And then the speakers from insular communities get told to fuck off with their special definitions, or they're so persistent that the new definition catches on. Either way, problem solved.
The word "literally" still serves its old purpose just fine, along with the new one.
My issue with "literally" is that it's become an actual part of the dictionary definition rather than being recognized as merely a hyperbolic use of the word.
Dictionaries can also note hyperbolic (and other "deformed") uses of words, especially when commonplace, I see no problem with that. You have some odd expectations from dictionaries.
English is what you get when a community can't defend its borders and keeps being taken over by new rulers with a different language, which then works its way partly into common usage. Also, random word borrowing, because fuck you it's ours now.
There were a lot more langauges on those isles long before and during the [still ongoing] development of english, and during the empire connecting to more of the world more than any other in history... so, not so insular during its development.
This is real and actually quite interesting to look at the history of. For example, the word "Decimate" IIRC was originally defined as killing one for every ten people of a group of people. Now, its used as a term for high impact destruction.
That's a good one. In school they had me memorize a novel of Latin root words, which is where things can get frustrating. You take a word and piece together the meaning, only to find out the definition has changed so drastically over the years that the root words are now nonsense. Both of our examples fit this description.
Yeah, I'm prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It's great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.
Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don't make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem "through faith" but its meaning is from the larger phrase "deceiving through faith."
It was originally killing 1 in every 10 by lot. In other words, not in battle, but as a collective punishment of a unit 1 in 10 soldiers would be randomly selected and killed.
1 in 10 soldiers dying in a battle doesn't sound all that bad. But, 1 in 10 soldiers being selected to be killed as a form of punishment for the unit sounds a lot worse.
Some terminology is better defined by how the relevant experts use it. It's singular and precise definition is required for any useful dialogue. If 99% of people call a kidney a liver but doctors call it a kidney its a kidney.
Some terminology evolves and is used differently by different groups. Sometimes the more illiterate group flattens the language by removing nuance or even entirely removing a concept from a language with no replacement. Arguably both definitions may be common usage but one is worse and using it means you are.
My two are Literally, and Crescendo. I really hate it when they are used wrong, and now the wrong answers are considered acceptable. That means Literally actually holds no meaning at all, and by changing the definition of Crescendo, the last 500 years of Western Music Theory have been changed by people who have no understanding of music at all.
I was not aware of the crescendo one and looked it up. Imagine my surprise learning this dates back at least 100 years ago with the Great Gatsby (have not read it). I am now irrationaly angry that I'm learning about this way too late to complain about it.
I knew that and wasn't irrationally angry at this one. A hyperbolic or absurd meaning does not bother me (but I get that its "overuse", for a while, could).
Literally holds meaning, two meanings principally. They just happen to be opposite. "Literally" could mean either "actually" or "not actually, but similar in a way", but wouldn't ever mean "duck".
It's supposed to mean an increase in volume, but instead it now means a climax. Saying something will "rise to a crescendo" is a popular saying, I've seen many good writers say it, but it is wrong. The rising part IS the Crescendo, and the proper way to say it would be that something "crescendoed to a climax." It is a specific musical term, with a specific musical meaning, and non-musical people have adopted it improperly.
Civilians can't just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings. We rely on those meanings to communicate in that world. It would be like suddenly calling a tire iron a stethoscope, and not understanding why a doctor would think that's stupid.
Civilians can’t just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I've ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
Obviously you look into the literature to see who has the first claim, and they get to keep it. The others have to edit and re-print the entirety of the corpus.
There is certain language that is technical to specific things.
A writer wants to borrow language from other worlds to add spice to their writing, so perhaps they borrow a musical term because they think it will describe an action with a special flair. He basically knows that the word Crescendo is a word that somehow relates to intensity, although he's not exactly sure of the nuance of it, but it has a really musical sound, and will add some nice flavor to his sentence. So he writes about something "rising to a crescendo" and every person who ever had band as a kid, or took piano lessons, etc. CRINGES.
It's not just about shifting language, it's about writers not offending their readers with imprecise, poorly chosen words. A writer should strive to choose the absolute correct word, with the exact nuance, and using Crescendo in place of Climax is an egregious example of a poor, imprecise choice that compromised the narrative, and worse, makes the reader question the writer's competency.
Truman Capote once sat at a bar with another writer, who said "I've spent all day working on one page," and Capote said "I spent all day working on one word."
That's because he wanted to choose the exact word, with the precise nuance, to tell his story. I believe that Capote would agree with me about Crescendo.
A writer once put the letter 's' in 'eiland' in order to make the word look more Latin. This, despite the fact that the word 'island' has no Latin roots. It caught on and now that is the proper spelling of 'island' and you'd be a fool to try to force people to spell it 'eiland'.
English is used by the unwashed masses and trying to get it to adhear to strict rules or not change will be as effective as trying to stop a flood by holding out your hand.
English was not exactly right when you were born with the spelling of 'island' and was wrong hundreds of years ago with 'eiland', nor is it wrong that dumb means stupid instead of mute, or literally can be used to mean figuratively.
Gif þū ne sacast for eftcyme to Eald Englisc, þonne is hit līcnessēocnes tō sacanne þæt sprǣc ne mæg wrixlan.
I sure hope you say pizzas are disk-shaped, not circle-shaped.
Disk and circle are properly defined geometric terms. Civilians can't just come in and start misusing them.
To be fair maybe you do make the difference between disks and circles, but the point is, you (and everyone) almost certainly "abuse" some other language element that will also annoy somebody else. And if they corrected you, when all your life you and people around you had done the same abuse and understood each other perfectly, you'd think, rightly, that they are being pedantic.
Look it up, it's actually fairly complicated, depending on whether you are talking about storage media, vertebrae, Frisbees, etc. and then there is a layer of US vs UK that gets involved.
Oh, yeah, and as for the answer about pizzas, they're Round. I've never called one a disk(c), or a circle.
Well yes it is to me too seeing as that abuse was not made, to my knowledge at least, in my native language.
But then I thought, "well if there is a crescendo, unless it goes on forever, there will be a climax". So I kinda get where the abuse (or misunderstanding, or literary license, or whatever the intent is) comes from. I don't, personally, agree with it, so won't use it that way. But whatever I personally think is irrelevant, at least now I am aware someone might mean that. So I guess now, in English at least, it's been long enough and widespread enough it's no longer an abuse (colloquially speaking)
How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn't clear it's almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.
Literally was being used as an intensifier in both cases where it was being used to signify the truth of something and in the absurdist manner. So, no, it didn't lose all meaning. So long as you're not emphasizing something too absurd to be considered real, the original meaning still holds. And if someone uses the word to emphasize something that could be real, though unlikely, they'll likely get the appropriate follow-up.
On the Crescendo one, do you also get mad about forte? Cause basically the same thing happened there. And no one will confuse the music term for the colloquial term in either case.
I hadn't really thought about forte, but now that you mention it, yeah, that one pisses me off, too. Thinking about it, I do avoid using that term.
And Literally is supposed to mean that some thing is truly as described, to differentiate between exaggeration. So when it is used as exaggeration, it causes the sort of confusion that means exactly what the literal meaning is literally supposed to avoid.
Heaven forbid someone use a colloquialism! How will they ever be understood?
(For the sake of clarity I feel I must point out that I do not believe Heaven should, in fact, forbid such a practice. I fear without this clarification my first sentence is impossible to understand.)
That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does "literally" give you fits when "awful" or "terrific" do not? Perhaps because it's the shift you happen to be living through?
Or maybe those other things shouldn't have happened, but it's too late for them. Now we have to save the words that are in danger now.
If a boat is sinking, and I'm saying we have to save those people, would the proper response be "Well, where were you when the Titanic was going down? Why aren't you all worried about them?"
Words aren't "endangered". There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use "awful" to mean "inspiring awe" and you're correct, you just won't be understood.
I grew up on dairy farm and it was one of my chores to shove the shit and then spread that shit nearly everyday. So I've had enough shit. I'm so done with that shit and the assholes it came out of. And I don't need anyone giving me shit anymore either.
I have walked in that shit, slipped in that shit, I have even fallen in that shit. Cow shit smells and tastes just as bad as the finest Bull shit. And that bullshit is mixed into that cow shit and the two can't be separated. No matter how hard you try. And I ain't dealing with any shit anymore for whatever time is left of my life.
But, I do like drinking my Daily Duck Shit. I have a cup of it right now. I love drinking my Daily Duck Shit and I always try to keep it on hand.
****For those that aren't fairly deep into Chinese Oolong teas, Duck Shit, “Ya Shi Xiang”, is type of Dan-Cong Oolong tea. You can google Duck Shit tea and get at least one origin story. They are fun stories.
For all intensive purposes, the meaning of words matters less than how we use it. Irregardless of how we decimate it's meaning, so long as we get the point across there is no need to nip it in the butt. Most people could care less.
Don't be one of these dickheads that defines shit their own way then gets upset when nobody agrees with your dumbass. There's quite a few people like that here on Lemmy and I find them to be the single most annoying type of user on this site.
Minor gripe - it's not right to say that everyone has to agree, but it is sensible to point out that one person has no real basis for having unique meanings for terms and then reacting poorly when others fail to use them.
Every word had an evolution or hard origin, and each stepping stone on those journeys had some first user. By whatever means, some of those new words or new tweaks on existing words caught on and spread.
And sometimes, despite generally widespread acceptance of a change or a new word, some folks will bitterly hold on to the old ways for years or decades until they just die wrong about it.
I've allready to rite we'll, but than my conscious sad, “For get the rules,” so I let my lose ideals led me. I’m two stubborn to accept that I should of staid in school.
Languages are living things. And living things always change. Note the Great English Vowel Change. Even the Norwegian my Grandfather spoke and that I learned from him was virtually a dead language that modern Norwegians stopped using in the 1850s. And the English spoken in the UK is different than the American English I speak. Spanish spoken in Spain isn't the same as someone from Mexico speaks.
And when conversing with someone, (in the language of your choice), the words you choose to use are defined by the context you use them in. Words can have multiple meanings, but it's the context and tone clarifies those meanings. Consider all the meanings of the single word 'fuck'.
But problems start with written words. And many people have poor written communication skills. It can be hard to parse meaning from poorly written words because there is little context and tone that comes through with a typed sentence.
We are all just baying at the moon like any pack. And hoping some understands us.
Written word is a facsimile of a facsimile of what we're actually communicating. We go from nebulous thoughts, concepts not bound by language, to sounds that roughly convey those concepts, and then to squiggly lines that roughly convey those sounds, and then back up the chain in the other person. Really, it's a miracle we understand each other at all.
I would say this is not universal. For some, the written word is the native "tongue", conveying the actual, intended meaning. The written word allows the speaker the opportunity to evaluate and revise their language to match their intent, and the listener the opportunity to re-evaluate previously transmitted thoughts.
The oral variant is dependent on the real-time aptitude of the speaker to articulate their thoughts and message, and for the listener to extract that meaning from the same. For those of us handicapped in these traits, the spoken word is the poor facsimile for actual (written) communication.
There are those constraints around written/spoken word, for sure. I'm more referring to how close it is to the "raw" thought.
We evolved the ability to think. In order to allow our thoughts to reach others, we developed spoken word. In order to allow those spoken words to be passed through time, we developed written word. Each refers back to the previous "layer" of communication.
Even someone who has a speech impediment, for instance, is still using the same written language as someone else in the same culture. And that written language was developed specifically to try and evoke the words someone in the culture speaks.
I can't help but think about 1984's newspeak whenever I see something like the abominable "unalive". I know the reasons are different for this particular one, but I agree that we seem to be moving into that kind of direction.
For me it's adjective/superlative escalation. Hey, this bagel is awesome. It fills me with awe. It's much better than this soda which is terrible, it strikes me with terror how bad it is. It results in having to throw in intensifiers, which we're exhausting as well. Wow this movie is so fucking good. It was worth leaving the house for.
I've also been both a second language teacher and second language learner. It is really hard to teach a language where 50% of the words are culture dependent and old texts are completely irrelevant. It's very hard to learn simple language and be told it's wrong now.
People talk about descriptivist drift like it's 100% inevitable or even good, ignoring that we have finally reached an era of long term preservation of text and speech, and of global communication. We could be the first generation to be understood plainly for millenia. And what we are deciding to do instead is to make language from 100 years ago sound like Chaucer.
The printing press was invented in 1440, the era of theoretical long-term-preservation has been here and languages keep changing despite it. We aren't going to hit the brakes on the specific period and culture that you happened to have been born into either.
The irony of someone named Soggy telling me about data preservation on paper is wonderful.
It's not even really the change, it's the rate of change. We are accelerating towards mutually unintelligible dialects at an outstanding rate, and at the same time do-nothing linguistic graduates are pleased to denigrate the idea of at least having a single widely-understood vocabulary so that a Malaysian can speak to a Scotsman without having to carry a dictionary.
Fully explaining why the thing you're asking for is both impossible and undesirable is a job for an anthropology thesis, but the tl;dr version is that it's a short and straight line from your position to advocating for cultural genocide.
Go on, lecture an Irish person about cultural genocide. I so wish we had a culture but we don't speak Irish anymore so of course we are a grey blob that nobody would recognise as distinct anymore 😪
Edit: downvote and run when "we just observe 💛" college rhetoric meets physical reality.
The reason most Americsn linguistics students equate language and culture is because a foreign language is the only different culture they've ever been exposed to.
That's literally how accents and dialects work. People in a bubble developed different linguistic shifts. To them, and to to broader world as a whole, they are speaking a correct form of English, and yet some thick accents are practically unintelligible to people who haven't practiced hearing the accent. We only recently began worrying about being understood beyond our narrow in groups. For the majority of history, these "bubbles" are just what we called cultures.
That explains why the ten thousand years of recorded history is filled with random violence and wars, but the point that I'm making is that things like Dictionaries and Encyclopedias and other written records should decide what is correct. They do indeed adapt over time when they have deemed things have sufficiently changed to update the definitions.
Just like how scientists decide what is science, historians decide what is history, so too should linguists decide what is proper use of a specific language.
who cares what people think? we're all going to die anyway, just use the words you want to use to say the things you want to say. whether or not you align with a stranger on the internet is only as relevant as you want it to be.
Wouldn't that philosophy accelerate the corruption of language, not just across generations, but spreading separation amongst us in the present, until we're just barking beasts lost without even any sound pretense of shared meaning communicated?
English is confusing enough. For the sake of future generation I'll correct you for using litterally like figuratively even if I'm the last person on earth that uses it correctly.
But using figuratively wouldn't really ever be correct either. "Literally" is usually used as a hyperbole, so if you would replace it with figuratively it wouldn't work as a hyperbole anymore. So it would change the meaning. Just because something is meant figuratively doesn't mean people would use the word figuratively to describe it.
Only one of these makes sense, but the other one is what's been used for a long time now. If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.
Edit: I don't mean to disagree with the simple fact that languages evolve over time. But having a majority dictate the meanings of words isn't something I like. The example of "antisemitism" (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.
If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.
If you change "have" to "keep" it is clearer in both instances. The second interpretation is clearer because it puts the consumption verb first, which implies this action precedes the subsequent verb. But the underlying statement holds true in either instance.
The example of “antisemitism” (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.
The joke of "antisemitism" is that Semitic People include Arabs and modern day Ethiopians/Somalians, two groups who are very explicitly and unapologetically persecuted by the Israeli state government. They do not include Eastern European expats who came to the Levant by way of Philadelphia.
Modern Western media describes an antisemite as a kind of anti-white racist critical of other western Jewish people in elite social circles. But the actual historical antisemitism - the one Henry Ford railed against in The International Jew and spammed across post-WW1 Europe after getting his brain cooked by Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is rooted in Christian Nationalism and anti-Immigration conspiracy theories that fit far more neatly with post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism and Cold War hostility towards the Third World.
The manipulation of language in this instance is a very deliberate effort to judo-flip the very idea of bigotry. You turn social energy aimed at pursuing an equitable and egalitarian society into an excuse to segregate the population and persecute poor immigrants and minorities.
I did a college paper circa 2000 on what a meme was before memes became memes. Which rather ironically, the concept of a meme originally was an idea that spreads and becomes an actual thing through person to person social transference, like what the word meme means currently. It’s like describing the back to the future plot lines.
My pet peeve is 'loose' being used when 'lose' is intended. It's so common now it might as well be the new spelling but I will die on this hill. I've had people comment in response to me correcting someone like I'm being ridiculous. Feels like I'm taking crazy pills!
This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it's so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don't know any better.
Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren't up to the standards they claim.
Worth pasting the whole bit... This saved my life:
By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.
(Kill yourself.)
Seriously though, if you are, do.
Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.
Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.
Seriously.
No this is not a joke. You’re [going], “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself
Planting seeds.
I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. (Machi…) Whatever, you know what I mean.
I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”
Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!
“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”
Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.
“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill’s very bright to do that.”
God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.
“Ooh, the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”
How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?
“What didya do today, honey?”
“Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said, you know, is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores]
Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya. This is your world, isn’t it?
What if it isn't everyone who uses a word "wrong"? What if it's say 25% of people who use it incorrectly? Should you encourage them to use it correctly?
If there are two different ways of using the word and they could be mistaken for each-other that's bad. Once the use of a word has flipped and means something very different from the original (idiot, gay, etc.) then there's no reason to try to return to the original usage. If the usage is still in dispute and the majority of people use the word in the original meaning, I think it's good to discourage people from using the word incorrectly so that people are still able to understand each-other.
I thnik Subcultures and sub-cultural contexts will always exist.
There's always some cases where people have - and prefer- a small or specialist audience.
If you try to discourage it too hard you'll probably end up with more slangs/ patois / creoles emerging. Try to clamp down of business consultant jargon and see what happens, a million worse terms will probably emerge.
But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word "incorrectly" but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you'd just be on the losing side of the battle historically.
I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.
The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn't sufficient.
But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.
You sound like you consider all linguistic evolution to be a bad thing. I'm not saying there shouldn't be opposition to change, indeed opposition helps to filter out pointless change, while worthwhile change will tend to overcome that opposition. So go ahead and be that opposition if you will, but it just seems like a limited perspective to me.
It reminds me of my English teachers at school who impressed upon me that it's incorrect to use the pronouns "they/them" in a singular, non-gender-specific context. So you had to go with the traditional but sexist "he" or an awkwardly pseudo-random distribution of "he" and "she", despite the fact that "they" was in common use colloquially. Perhaps my teachers' fervent opposition was only fueled by the fact that it was a language problem which popular usage had already solved. They were fighting a valiant rearguard action against common sense, and I'm glad they lost.
But, you're just one person. You won't be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you'll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you'd be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don't even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
then it's an unsettled contest between a split community
a language's community isn't bound by any rules: it's free to change a language however it chooses
I've found a language policing minority on here try to pejorate female as derogatory, and I explain to them that by trying to induct sexist presuppositions into the language they're either sexist or playing themselves
First, some languages do have authorities that bound their language by rules. For example, the Académie Française and the Real Academia Española, which work for French and Spanish, respectively. English is an exception, which uses common usage rather than strict “definitions.” So while English is free to change with speakers, some languages do have official groups that make rules about their use.
Second, those who dislike “female” (when used as a noun describing female humans, specifically) aren’t turning the word into a pejorative - they are merely reporting that their experience with the word, when used in that way, expresses derogatory sentiments. The critics aren’t turning it into a “bad word,” the people who use “female” to describe women and girls are already using it to “otherize” and dehumanize half the population. To ignore the way that effect makes women and girls feel, even though they’re the ones being directly affected by such usage, is quite dismissive. I don’t want to throw around the word “mansplaining” willy nilly, but if you’re a man who goes around explaining to women that they shouldn’t be offended by a term that impacts them, but which you have no personal stake in, it might be wise to step back and listen to their experiences.
First, some languages do have authorities that bound their language by rules.
All natural languages work the same way.
Some institution claiming otherwise doesn’t change that.
aren’t turning the word into a pejorative
::: spoiler This analogy fits you.
Imagine online activists started condemning usage of the word dutch as a slur.
It's bizarre: there is nothing wrong with the dutch, yet they're acting as though we should think so & resist that urge?
Why are they propagating problematic presuppositions we don't have about the dutch?
Why are they trying to make this official?
Are they some special breed of stupid?
Continuing this analogy, they drag you into fights by claiming you're a racist for using the word when you're not actually saying anything offensive about the dutch.
You & the rest of society know the word dutch isn't offensive, yet these activists insist it is by pointing to some fringe online community spewing vitriolic propaganda about dutch inferiority specifically using the word dutch.
You repudiate their claim by asking why some fringe group irrelevant to wider society gets to decide the meaning of words, but they condemn your "hurtful" language and say you're as bad as them or one of them.
Don't be an asshole & use another word like Dutchperson, Netherlander, or Hollander they say: it's the right thing to do & shows socially conscientious, moral rectitude.
:::
Yes, they are whether they recognize it or not: from an external, impartial observer, claiming there's a problem with the word female with little regard for context communicates the problem resides in whatever the word itself denotes rather than the contextual meaning.
Our society includes both a minority of sexists & a vast majority of non-sexists who use the word female differently, yet these activists privilege the language & rhetoric of the sexist minority over the non-sexist majority.
Why should the sexists get to decide the meaning of words for everyone & the unequal ideas to perpetuate in society?
Who does that serve?
Older activists understood that doesn’t serve them and chose to reclaim words like black & queer as words of pride instead.
Newer activists would be wise to follow that example: instead of antagonizing non-sexists by treating them as sexists or fulfilling an inferiority complex to establish sexist language as normative, they could try not playing themselves.
The rest you wrote is misguided opinion you'd ironically perpetuate.
the people who use “female” to describe women and girls are already using it to “otherize” and dehumanize half the population
Counterfactual.
The language community decides the meaning of words through observed usage, and in the preponderance of the community, female is inoffensive.
That includes among females themselves.
Female is used self-referentially “in-group”: it shows up in feminist book titles, in dating communities (eg, “F4F/M”), classifieds (eg, “need a roommate […] females only”), etc.
In conventional language, female is an acceptable word.
I don’t want to throw around the word “mansplaining” willy nilly
Logic has no sex.
You'd be wise not to internalize & promote sexism.
It makes little sense to think of language outside of communities, so if a speech community uses a word in a certain way then it's correct in that context.
Of course, most states find it useful to establish an official variant. It is usually based on whatever the ruling class speaks, and is claimed to be 'correct', but there are no objective linguistic criteria which make it possible to say that Parisian French is more correct than e.g. Haitian French.
Antisemitism has be co-opted and applied to any and all criticism of Israel, as opposed to it's previous meaning, hatred of Jews/Judaism. This isn't strictly because the meaning of the word is being used differently as much as it is that proponents of Israel like to conflate Israel with all of Judaism, or even more broadly with all Jews (as an ethnic group as opposed to a religious one). Since Israel takes any criticism to be hatred, the inevitable consequence is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I'm splitting hairs here and probably making things more complicated than they need to be... But hopefully you understand what I'm getting at.
Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition "antisemitism" itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because "Semites", or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others... Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.
Well as a Germany I have to be very careful what I say about this topic.
Let's first make clear that the Israeli government and Jews are not the same entity.
Then let me state that I don't care about your religion you can believe in what you want.
Now I can say that I don't agree with the current actions of Israeli government in this war.
Antisemitism should always be the word for the racism against Jews. When people call you that for criticising war actions of the Israeli government then ignore them or give them the Wikipedia article for the word.
Antisemitism should always be the word for the racism against Jews
Nope. Not even that. [(Open to hearing any reasoning why though.)]
Like was just said [nearly well enough (because not all of them)] in what you replied to:
Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition “antisemitism” itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because “Semites”, or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others… Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.
Imagine how nice it'd be if we mended language, undoing the Orwellianisms. We'd be able to communicate.
There's something you can do. You shall seek it, find it, and do it.
Even if it's just averting the lie within the lie, and avoiding the language of the oppressor that spreads not just the lie, but the lie within the lie.
Yeah Germany especially are treating terribly their protesting population who don’t want to see children being murdered en masse by a state. Which is HORRIBLY IRONIC.
Unlike humans, the entities who process those aren't capable of mentally compensating on the fly for deviations from the standard so "wrong words" are immediately punished and can't proliferate.
Those just invent new frameworks every six months which everyone should totally use this new framework, for reasons. Though, maybe that's just JavaScript.
some users can't read this due to lack of alt text
users can't adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
systems can't read the text to them or send it to braille devices
searchability: the "text" isn't indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
fault tolerance: no text fallback if
image breaks
image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
:::
yes, conventions (which include natural language) work that way: the community of users sets the convention
It's called "metathesis". We did it over hundreds of years with 'bird' which was originally 'brid' or 'bridd', and 'wasp' which was originally 'waps', apparently.
In German it's also Wespe, but in my local Austrian dialect it's pronounced Wepsn. Very interesting, I didn't know that shift had happened (or I guess not happened) elsewhere.
I thought "wasp" came from the Norman word "wespe" (French word guespe then later guêpe), but is that not true? Or do we just not know and these are possible explanations but there is no consensus?
So, disclaimer here that I'm not a linguist, I just enjoy learning about linguistics.
OED doesn't have a Norman ancestor for English wasp - it goes back through Old English (wæfs, wæps, wæsp) to Saxon and Middle German/Dutch all the way back to pre-Germanic.
My guess here was that there's a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor and Wiktionary, FWIW, agrees - they provide a reconstructed P.I.E word: *wóbʰseh₂ (“wasp”)
ETA: here's the link to the OED online's etymology page and a screenshot of it if you don't have access through your library.
Thanks a lot for the answer! Quite interesting that the Proto-Indo-European word could have been something close to wasp, only for English to go through the waps->wasp that you explained in your previous post.
Well, one fewer false "fact" to believe in, many more to go!
The language we use today is a bastardization of how language was.
Every complaint you make about people using language wrong someone has made about the language you are using. And they complained first
I'm not interested in fighting you either, I was just asking, perhaps the interesting conversation still could've occurred. (Admittedly that other reply to you is really good and extensive, and I wouldn't have much to add after that.)
This is not the first time I hear someone singling out French for this and I kind of wonder why.
Yes, there is a prescriptive institution "Académie Française" and yes it has had an influence on the normalisation of French in the past (like, 400 years ago).
No, linguistically, it does not work that simply (French is not prescriptivist), and it's been a while since anyone gave a damn what this institution says. French marches on, and the Académie is largely regarded as an illegitimate group of old men who try to force a classicist and artificial version of the language of their own making. They also have other missions which aren't about prescribing usage, but that's not what you usually hear about.
Also no, this institution no longer dictates what "proper" French is, and by that I mean it does not dictate it "legally" anymore. It never did, linguistically speaking.
And finally, I don't know why it is that French is the language always used when it comes to descriptivism vs prescriptivism. From my admittedly limited knowledge, it looks to me like at least in western Europe, English is the exception rather the rule regarding this. Other countries and languages have had prescriptivist institutions propped up in the past to try and dictate usage of the language.
In all cases, whatever they say does not automatically become gospel. You can make a point that such institutions can suggest usages, but they can't force them. Like the other commenter said, this is not how languages work. Ultimately, whatever the institutions say, if the people don't use it this way, then the institution is wrong.
Lots of French creoles and patois across the ex-French-empire.
The French authorities can define it as not "French" if they don't like it, but I doubt the speakers care.
Damn right. Also, to the address of my far too numerous fellow Frenchmen from metropolitan France who are irritated by your post and mine above: Swiss French is French, Belgian French is French, Quebec French is French, Cajun is French, and so are the multitude of other ones the post above mentions, and if you don't accept it, please listen to "La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part" from Georges Brassens. He has something to say about you.
Oh, that's easy. A liter is what you buy bottled water by and you buy soda pop in 2 liter bottles. Wine and whisk(e)y is 750ml bottles. It's also the displacement of your car's engine. Though we use cc's for chainsaws and motorcycles, weird I know.
It just shows how little society is anchored in reason. And people wonder why politicians don't take them serious. People who can't maintain structure and are easily swayed by group think can be made to believe anything.
And "6 7" is a shibboleth, a linguistic phenomenon that's been going on for as long as we have written history, essentially, it's just now that it's the youngins doing the thing, it's bad. Yeah, you right, pretty shitty take.
Nah. When people use medical terminology to stigmatize and dehumanize people, they are using words wrong. When people use the word for a class of person as an insult, they are using words wrong. When people speak in bad faith, they are using words wrong.
Ok ok... I'll be the one...
"Wrongly"
no worries I'll use it the wrongliest
You can always go wrongliester!
I'll use it righteously.
I’m gonna use it wrongteously
not not-heinous
Good wrongliesterness.
He wrongly assumed he was using the word wrongly.
Very bigly, indeed!
Incidentally, I really hate that the UK expression for when someone is feeling sick is "poorly".
It's got the "ly" ending which is one of the clear signs of an adverb, and in other contexts it is used as an adverb. But, for some reason the British have turned it into an adjective meaning sick. Sometimes they use it in a way where it can be seen as an adverb: "He's feeling poorly", in which case it seems to be modifying "feeling". In the North American dialect you could substitute the adjective "sick": "He's feeling sick". But, other times they say "She won't be coming in today, she's poorly". What is the adverb modifying there, "is"?
Washing-up fluid.
Washing up what?
Dishes?
Dishwasher fluid.
Why fluid, not liquid? Air is a fluid too. Is it in gaseous form?
Also, why "washing-up"? Was "washing" not enough? Was a direction strictly necessary?
Plasma?
Think different
Some flat adverbs sound perfectly natural to most speakers, like "play nice" or "drive safe". Others have less acceptability among people in general, like "That tastes real good."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_adverb
Tastes real goodly.
I don't even see "nice" in "play nice" as an adverb. You could switch "play" for "be" -- "be nice", same with "be safe".
There's that old line that if my aunt had wheels she'd be a bicycle. Maybe the command form is muddling the topic here, but using the be-verb with an adjective like that attaches a subject complement, essentially describing the subject. But "I am fast" describing a person doesn't mean that saying "I drive fast" is describing a drive as a noun.
Playly not nice.
I'm gonna get the shit downvoted out of me for this, but the problem with this idea is that insular communities tend to redefine words and then expect everyone outside their bubble to know their new definition. Doing so also robs the language of a word that served a specific purpose, such as in the case of the word "literally."
And then the speakers from insular communities get told to fuck off with their special definitions, or they're so persistent that the new definition catches on. Either way, problem solved.
The word "literally" still serves its old purpose just fine, along with the new one.
My issue with "literally" is that it's become an actual part of the dictionary definition rather than being recognized as merely a hyperbolic use of the word.
Dictionaries are books of history, not law.
Language pedantry is a branch of theology.
Those two sentences are not mutually exclusive.
But every word can be used hyperbolically.
no, it can't. hyperbole means to exaggerate, to a great degree. descriptors like "round" or "soft" can't be hyperbolic.
Calling fat people round is hyperbole isn't it?
Or calling a bald guy "Curly"
It really depends on how they are built. I have deffo seen some rounder obese people.
no, it's either true or false, but even a false usage isn't hyperbolic, it's just wrong
Dictionaries can also note hyperbolic (and other "deformed") uses of words, especially when commonplace, I see no problem with that. You have some odd expectations from dictionaries.
A dictionary is a record.
Language influences the dictionary, the dictionary doesn't influence language.
Did that literally happen?
Or has actual fallen foul of another meaning change too now?
It's a definition in Merriam-Webster as of several years ago.
My pet example is Americans and "ironically/unironically".
Please don't do this to me
Didn't english literally develop in an insular community (britain)?
English is what you get when a community can't defend its borders and keeps being taken over by new rulers with a different language, which then works its way partly into common usage. Also, random word borrowing, because fuck you it's ours now.
Not insular enough to be isolated, hence that saying about it being three languages in a trenchcoat.
Of course not isolated, but insular, literally.
There were a lot more langauges on those isles long before and during the [still ongoing] development of english, and during the empire connecting to more of the world more than any other in history... so, not so insular during its development.
Literally.
I literally love and hate this comment.
Lol, I came here to make this exact comment
That's dumb (which originally meant "mute" or "unable to speak")
This is real and actually quite interesting to look at the history of. For example, the word "Decimate" IIRC was originally defined as killing one for every ten people of a group of people. Now, its used as a term for high impact destruction.
My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it's more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.
That's a good one. In school they had me memorize a novel of Latin root words, which is where things can get frustrating. You take a word and piece together the meaning, only to find out the definition has changed so drastically over the years that the root words are now nonsense. Both of our examples fit this description.
Yeah, I'm prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It's great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.
Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don't make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem "through faith" but its meaning is from the larger phrase "deceiving through faith."
Mine is electrocuted which means to die or get executed by electricity but people say "the person got electrocuted and is recovering in the hospital".
I mean, I’d still call 1 out of 10 people dying “high impact.”
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
It was originally killing 1 in every 10 by lot. In other words, not in battle, but as a collective punishment of a unit 1 in 10 soldiers would be randomly selected and killed.
1 in 10 soldiers dying in a battle doesn't sound all that bad. But, 1 in 10 soldiers being selected to be killed as a form of punishment for the unit sounds a lot worse.
IIRC the other nine had to kill them, by beating with sticks? which makes it so much worse. Rarely used in extremis I believe.
Yay, pseudoliteracy wins. Again. 🤢
Well. Sort of.
Some terminology is better defined by how the relevant experts use it. It's singular and precise definition is required for any useful dialogue. If 99% of people call a kidney a liver but doctors call it a kidney its a kidney.
Some terminology evolves and is used differently by different groups. Sometimes the more illiterate group flattens the language by removing nuance or even entirely removing a concept from a language with no replacement. Arguably both definitions may be common usage but one is worse and using it means you are.
But do you mean literally everyone or literally everyone?
I mean this i show it literally works, right?
My two are Literally, and Crescendo. I really hate it when they are used wrong, and now the wrong answers are considered acceptable. That means Literally actually holds no meaning at all, and by changing the definition of Crescendo, the last 500 years of Western Music Theory have been changed by people who have no understanding of music at all.
I was not aware of the crescendo one and looked it up. Imagine my surprise learning this dates back at least 100 years ago with the Great Gatsby (have not read it). I am now irrationaly angry that I'm learning about this way too late to complain about it.
Literally being used in the absurdist manner also dates back to the 1800s
I knew that and wasn't irrationally angry at this one. A hyperbolic or absurd meaning does not bother me (but I get that its "overuse", for a while, could).
Literally holds meaning, two meanings principally. They just happen to be opposite. "Literally" could mean either "actually" or "not actually, but similar in a way", but wouldn't ever mean "duck".
"Literally" only holds the opposite meaning when used as a hyperbole.
You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.
Joke's on you, I'm having roasted literally for dinner
How does someone use crescendo wrong?
Apparently, to mean the climax rather than the increase leading to it.
It's supposed to mean an increase in volume, but instead it now means a climax. Saying something will "rise to a crescendo" is a popular saying, I've seen many good writers say it, but it is wrong. The rising part IS the Crescendo, and the proper way to say it would be that something "crescendoed to a climax." It is a specific musical term, with a specific musical meaning, and non-musical people have adopted it improperly.
Civilians can't just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings. We rely on those meanings to communicate in that world. It would be like suddenly calling a tire iron a stethoscope, and not understanding why a doctor would think that's stupid.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I've ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
Obviously you look into the literature to see who has the first claim, and they get to keep it. The others have to edit and re-print the entirety of the corpus.
Sounds reasonable to me.
There is certain language that is technical to specific things.
A writer wants to borrow language from other worlds to add spice to their writing, so perhaps they borrow a musical term because they think it will describe an action with a special flair. He basically knows that the word Crescendo is a word that somehow relates to intensity, although he's not exactly sure of the nuance of it, but it has a really musical sound, and will add some nice flavor to his sentence. So he writes about something "rising to a crescendo" and every person who ever had band as a kid, or took piano lessons, etc. CRINGES.
It's not just about shifting language, it's about writers not offending their readers with imprecise, poorly chosen words. A writer should strive to choose the absolute correct word, with the exact nuance, and using Crescendo in place of Climax is an egregious example of a poor, imprecise choice that compromised the narrative, and worse, makes the reader question the writer's competency.
Truman Capote once sat at a bar with another writer, who said "I've spent all day working on one page," and Capote said "I spent all day working on one word."
That's because he wanted to choose the exact word, with the precise nuance, to tell his story. I believe that Capote would agree with me about Crescendo.
A writer once put the letter 's' in 'eiland' in order to make the word look more Latin. This, despite the fact that the word 'island' has no Latin roots. It caught on and now that is the proper spelling of 'island' and you'd be a fool to try to force people to spell it 'eiland'.
English is used by the unwashed masses and trying to get it to adhear to strict rules or not change will be as effective as trying to stop a flood by holding out your hand.
English was not exactly right when you were born with the spelling of 'island' and was wrong hundreds of years ago with 'eiland', nor is it wrong that dumb means stupid instead of mute, or literally can be used to mean figuratively.
Gif þū ne sacast for eftcyme to Eald Englisc, þonne is hit līcnessēocnes tō sacanne þæt sprǣc ne mæg wrixlan.
I sure hope you say pizzas are disk-shaped, not circle-shaped.
Disk and circle are properly defined geometric terms. Civilians can't just come in and start misusing them.
To be fair maybe you do make the difference between disks and circles, but the point is, you (and everyone) almost certainly "abuse" some other language element that will also annoy somebody else. And if they corrected you, when all your life you and people around you had done the same abuse and understood each other perfectly, you'd think, rightly, that they are being pedantic.
Do you mean Disk, or Disc?
Both spellings are accepted to designate the mathematical object. I think it's mostly a UK vs US spelling but please don't quote me on that.
EDIT just realised I missed the opportunity to answer with the extremely unhelpful mathematician response: "yes"
Look it up, it's actually fairly complicated, depending on whether you are talking about storage media, vertebrae, Frisbees, etc. and then there is a layer of US vs UK that gets involved.
Oh, yeah, and as for the answer about pizzas, they're Round. I've never called one a disk(c), or a circle.
is Tire Iron, the same as Tyre Lever?
Looks like a stethoscope to me.
Everyone can do with a language whatever the fuck they want.
Intelligibility is the only rule in a living language.
So go suck your bravura, and prima vista all over your colla voce.
That's odd
Well yes it is to me too seeing as that abuse was not made, to my knowledge at least, in my native language.
But then I thought, "well if there is a crescendo, unless it goes on forever, there will be a climax". So I kinda get where the abuse (or misunderstanding, or literary license, or whatever the intent is) comes from. I don't, personally, agree with it, so won't use it that way. But whatever I personally think is irrelevant, at least now I am aware someone might mean that. So I guess now, in English at least, it's been long enough and widespread enough it's no longer an abuse (colloquially speaking)
The climax one is in the dictionary.
I'm pretty sure this battle was lost a long time ago. No idea why OP thinks it wasn't.
How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn't clear it's almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym
Interesting! TIL
Literally was being used as an intensifier in both cases where it was being used to signify the truth of something and in the absurdist manner. So, no, it didn't lose all meaning. So long as you're not emphasizing something too absurd to be considered real, the original meaning still holds. And if someone uses the word to emphasize something that could be real, though unlikely, they'll likely get the appropriate follow-up.
On the Crescendo one, do you also get mad about forte? Cause basically the same thing happened there. And no one will confuse the music term for the colloquial term in either case.
I hadn't really thought about forte, but now that you mention it, yeah, that one pisses me off, too. Thinking about it, I do avoid using that term.
And Literally is supposed to mean that some thing is truly as described, to differentiate between exaggeration. So when it is used as exaggeration, it causes the sort of confusion that means exactly what the literal meaning is literally supposed to avoid.
Heaven forbid someone use a colloquialism! How will they ever be understood?
(For the sake of clarity I feel I must point out that I do not believe Heaven should, in fact, forbid such a practice. I fear without this clarification my first sentence is impossible to understand.)
You shouldn't use religious slang in your writing, it offends the Puritans.
"Heaven" originally meant "the visible sky" so this is fine.
That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does "literally" give you fits when "awful" or "terrific" do not? Perhaps because it's the shift you happen to be living through?
Or maybe those other things shouldn't have happened, but it's too late for them. Now we have to save the words that are in danger now.
If a boat is sinking, and I'm saying we have to save those people, would the proper response be "Well, where were you when the Titanic was going down? Why aren't you all worried about them?"
This guy is trying to mop up the beach every time the tide comes in.
Nah, I'm just fighting the battle for Literally and Crescendo. Those are my hills to die on. I can't save the entire literary world by myself.
Those words are already lost.
Holy shit, that's good
It uses figurative language instead of the literal meaning of words so it's complete nonsense.
Words aren't "endangered". There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use "awful" to mean "inspiring awe" and you're correct, you just won't be understood.
I think "whence" is a near-perfect example. "Whence" means "from what origin".
The word is used nearly exclusively in the phrase "from whence it came", or "from (from what origin) it came"
Love it.
"I have to return back to the ATM machine, but I forgot my PIN number."
And I'm still gonna bitch about it if they've reduced the usefulness of a word due to habitual misuse!
Honestly, I could care less about this shit.
Do you care a lot or only a little?
I told you, I could care less! It's a moot point!
But, how much less could you care? Alot less?
Ah, my favourite.
Gets my brain scrambling for what caring less than zero could be.
Negative care...
Turtles.
I literally don't give a shit
And I don't want any of your shit.
I grew up on dairy farm and it was one of my chores to shove the shit and then spread that shit nearly everyday. So I've had enough shit. I'm so done with that shit and the assholes it came out of. And I don't need anyone giving me shit anymore either.
So you just keep your shit to yourself.
Cow shit's not that bad.
Don't tell me that's bullshit.
I have walked in that shit, slipped in that shit, I have even fallen in that shit. Cow shit smells and tastes just as bad as the finest Bull shit. And that bullshit is mixed into that cow shit and the two can't be separated. No matter how hard you try. And I ain't dealing with any shit anymore for whatever time is left of my life.
But, I do like drinking my Daily Duck Shit. I have a cup of it right now. I love drinking my Daily Duck Shit and I always try to keep it on hand.
****For those that aren't fairly deep into Chinese Oolong teas, Duck Shit, “Ya Shi Xiang”, is type of Dan-Cong Oolong tea. You can google Duck Shit tea and get at least one origin story. They are fun stories.
Try pig shit.
I can't tell if you're using this idiomatic expression in the wrong way on purpose for a great joke, or in an annoying, unaware way. 😅
Its obviously a joke.
But maybe you understood that and your comment is sarcastic as well. So now I am the one being woooshed.
🥸
Is... is your reply sarcastic too? How far does this sarcasm uncertainuum go?
For all intensive purposes, the meaning of words matters less than how we use it. Irregardless of how we decimate it's meaning, so long as we get the point across there is no need to nip it in the butt. Most people could care less.
Everyone has to agree tho.
Don't be one of these dickheads that defines shit their own way then gets upset when nobody agrees with your dumbass. There's quite a few people like that here on Lemmy and I find them to be the single most annoying type of user on this site.
It's better to use words correctly, but in ways that call your understanding of the definition into question.
"I hacked into my sister's facebook when she left it open on her laptop."
"In an act of philanthropy I gave George the rest of my fries."
"Mr. Hands died for his passion, a modern day saint."
"Tiamat is a Bad Dragon."
Minor gripe - it's not right to say that everyone has to agree, but it is sensible to point out that one person has no real basis for having unique meanings for terms and then reacting poorly when others fail to use them.
Every word had an evolution or hard origin, and each stepping stone on those journeys had some first user. By whatever means, some of those new words or new tweaks on existing words caught on and spread.
And sometimes, despite generally widespread acceptance of a change or a new word, some folks will bitterly hold on to the old ways for years or decades until they just die wrong about it.
By whatever memes . . .
Yeah TRVE, making a point of intentionally being dumb usually means you're an insufferable cvnt
Can I have some more pixels please
April I have more pixels please
June I have more pixels please.<- period
I don't know, june you?
Just June?
Not every month?
Would you mind providing us a few more pixels? Only if it is no trouble o'course.
/j
I've allready to rite we'll, but than my conscious sad, “For get the rules,” so I let my lose ideals led me. I’m two stubborn to accept that I should of staid in school.
Languages are living things. And living things always change. Note the Great English Vowel Change. Even the Norwegian my Grandfather spoke and that I learned from him was virtually a dead language that modern Norwegians stopped using in the 1850s. And the English spoken in the UK is different than the American English I speak. Spanish spoken in Spain isn't the same as someone from Mexico speaks.
And when conversing with someone, (in the language of your choice), the words you choose to use are defined by the context you use them in. Words can have multiple meanings, but it's the context and tone clarifies those meanings. Consider all the meanings of the single word 'fuck'.
But problems start with written words. And many people have poor written communication skills. It can be hard to parse meaning from poorly written words because there is little context and tone that comes through with a typed sentence.
We are all just baying at the moon like any pack. And hoping some understands us.
Written word is a facsimile of a facsimile of what we're actually communicating. We go from nebulous thoughts, concepts not bound by language, to sounds that roughly convey those concepts, and then to squiggly lines that roughly convey those sounds, and then back up the chain in the other person. Really, it's a miracle we understand each other at all.
I would say this is not universal. For some, the written word is the native "tongue", conveying the actual, intended meaning. The written word allows the speaker the opportunity to evaluate and revise their language to match their intent, and the listener the opportunity to re-evaluate previously transmitted thoughts.
The oral variant is dependent on the real-time aptitude of the speaker to articulate their thoughts and message, and for the listener to extract that meaning from the same. For those of us handicapped in these traits, the spoken word is the poor facsimile for actual (written) communication.
There are those constraints around written/spoken word, for sure. I'm more referring to how close it is to the "raw" thought.
We evolved the ability to think. In order to allow our thoughts to reach others, we developed spoken word. In order to allow those spoken words to be passed through time, we developed written word. Each refers back to the previous "layer" of communication.
Even someone who has a speech impediment, for instance, is still using the same written language as someone else in the same culture. And that written language was developed specifically to try and evoke the words someone in the culture speaks.
We should probably resist hyper simplifying language, but whatever, I guess.
I can't help but think about 1984's newspeak whenever I see something like the abominable "unalive". I know the reasons are different for this particular one, but I agree that we seem to be moving into that kind of direction.
"We need a new, more powerful, word for things that are bad and wrong. Badong."
For me it's adjective/superlative escalation. Hey, this bagel is awesome. It fills me with awe. It's much better than this soda which is terrible, it strikes me with terror how bad it is. It results in having to throw in intensifiers, which we're exhausting as well. Wow this movie is so fucking good. It was worth leaving the house for.
I've also been both a second language teacher and second language learner. It is really hard to teach a language where 50% of the words are culture dependent and old texts are completely irrelevant. It's very hard to learn simple language and be told it's wrong now.
People talk about descriptivist drift like it's 100% inevitable or even good, ignoring that we have finally reached an era of long term preservation of text and speech, and of global communication. We could be the first generation to be understood plainly for millenia. And what we are deciding to do instead is to make language from 100 years ago sound like Chaucer.
The printing press was invented in 1440, the era of theoretical long-term-preservation has been here and languages keep changing despite it. We aren't going to hit the brakes on the specific period and culture that you happened to have been born into either.
The irony of someone named Soggy telling me about data preservation on paper is wonderful.
It's not even really the change, it's the rate of change. We are accelerating towards mutually unintelligible dialects at an outstanding rate, and at the same time do-nothing linguistic graduates are pleased to denigrate the idea of at least having a single widely-understood vocabulary so that a Malaysian can speak to a Scotsman without having to carry a dictionary.
Fully explaining why the thing you're asking for is both impossible and undesirable is a job for an anthropology thesis, but the tl;dr version is that it's a short and straight line from your position to advocating for cultural genocide.
Sure it is. Short and straight.
Go on, lecture an Irish person about cultural genocide. I so wish we had a culture but we don't speak Irish anymore so of course we are a grey blob that nobody would recognise as distinct anymore 😪
Edit: downvote and run when "we just observe 💛" college rhetoric meets physical reality.
The reason most Americsn linguistics students equate language and culture is because a foreign language is the only different culture they've ever been exposed to.
Agree++
If it's only morons that use it "wrong", then it does indeed become right, but still gains the added subtext of "by the way I'm also a moron"
So I should accept people saying "could care less" when they mean the exact opposite? Not sure I can do that.
I'm going to disagree here on the basis that this logic leads to bubbles of people thinking they're right when they're not even close to a majority.
That's literally how accents and dialects work. People in a bubble developed different linguistic shifts. To them, and to to broader world as a whole, they are speaking a correct form of English, and yet some thick accents are practically unintelligible to people who haven't practiced hearing the accent. We only recently began worrying about being understood beyond our narrow in groups. For the majority of history, these "bubbles" are just what we called cultures.
That explains why the ten thousand years of recorded history is filled with random violence and wars, but the point that I'm making is that things like Dictionaries and Encyclopedias and other written records should decide what is correct. They do indeed adapt over time when they have deemed things have sufficiently changed to update the definitions.
Just like how scientists decide what is science, historians decide what is history, so too should linguists decide what is proper use of a specific language.
Dauntingly compelling advert for RP for the whole world. O_O
Everyone on mid-atlantic "accent".
Or how long until "mid-pacific" chinglish?
For world peace.
O_O
We're just getting to the oldest linguistic debate. Is a linguist's job to describe, or to prescribe? I lean very heavily towards describe.
who cares what people think? we're all going to die anyway, just use the words you want to use to say the things you want to say. whether or not you align with a stranger on the internet is only as relevant as you want it to be.
Wouldn't that philosophy accelerate the corruption of language, not just across generations, but spreading separation amongst us in the present, until we're just barking beasts lost without even any sound pretense of shared meaning communicated?
not really? slippery slope fallacy
If they're making a mistake in public and it leads to repercussions for all of us, better to correct their mistake.
"Everyone" meaning the social media someone and their social set get their info and cues from, not the rest of the people around them.
English is confusing enough. For the sake of future generation I'll correct you for using litterally like figuratively even if I'm the last person on earth that uses it correctly.
But using figuratively wouldn't really ever be correct either. "Literally" is usually used as a hyperbole, so if you would replace it with figuratively it wouldn't work as a hyperbole anymore. So it would change the meaning. Just because something is meant figuratively doesn't mean people would use the word figuratively to describe it.
Emphasis and meaning through context are key in the English language. "Correct" Grammar and "proper" RP English can get fucked.
Were they using literally like figuratively or were they using literally figuratively?
Only if they all use it the same wrong way?
What if I told you that if everyone uses a word the “wrong” way, in slightly different ways, it’s wrong?
"Everyone" is a very, very high bar.
Good luck explaining this to l'Académie Française !
Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.
Tabernac!
My first reaction… “not in fucking French…”
Descriptive
languagegrammar >> prescriptivelanguagegrammar"Can't have your cake and eat it too"
vs.
"Can't eat your cake and have it too"
Only one of these makes sense, but the other one is what's been used for a long time now. If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.
Edit: I don't mean to disagree with the simple fact that languages evolve over time. But having a majority dictate the meanings of words isn't something I like. The example of "antisemitism" (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.
If you change "have" to "keep" it is clearer in both instances. The second interpretation is clearer because it puts the consumption verb first, which implies this action precedes the subsequent verb. But the underlying statement holds true in either instance.
The joke of "antisemitism" is that Semitic People include Arabs and modern day Ethiopians/Somalians, two groups who are very explicitly and unapologetically persecuted by the Israeli state government. They do not include Eastern European expats who came to the Levant by way of Philadelphia.
Modern Western media describes an antisemite as a kind of anti-white racist critical of other western Jewish people in elite social circles. But the actual historical antisemitism - the one Henry Ford railed against in The International Jew and spammed across post-WW1 Europe after getting his brain cooked by Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is rooted in Christian Nationalism and anti-Immigration conspiracy theories that fit far more neatly with post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism and Cold War hostility towards the Third World.
The manipulation of language in this instance is a very deliberate effort to judo-flip the very idea of bigotry. You turn social energy aimed at pursuing an equitable and egalitarian society into an excuse to segregate the population and persecute poor immigrants and minorities.
Can also contort it back into still kinda working the wrong way around by interpreting "have" as in consuming it, like synonym for eat.
Have you had your cake yet?
No?
Have it now.
Have your cake.
Had it?
Good.
Now eat it...
Cant?
Already had it.
... Cleverly unwrongs it.
Would be simpler if just said "cant eat your cake and have it".
Or was.
Before I just brought up "have"'s ability to be a synonym for eat.
This was one of the phrases that helped them identify the unabomber
LITERALLY everyone!
I did a college paper circa 2000 on what a meme was before memes became memes. Which rather ironically, the concept of a meme originally was an idea that spreads and becomes an actual thing through person to person social transference, like what the word meme means currently. It’s like describing the back to the future plot lines.
My pet peeve is 'loose' being used when 'lose' is intended. It's so common now it might as well be the new spelling but I will die on this hill. I've had people comment in response to me correcting someone like I'm being ridiculous. Feels like I'm taking crazy pills!
I would of made this post myself but I like literally don't care enough.
Singular "you" is grammatically incorrect. "You" is plural, "thee" and "thou" are singular.
What are you on about, "Y'all" is the plural of "you"
Yinz… youse guys
Calling a Markov Chain Generator "Artificial Intelligence" is STILL WRONG.
This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it's so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don't know any better.
Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren't up to the standards they claim.
Worth pasting the whole bit... This saved my life:
-- Bill Hicks
What if it isn't everyone who uses a word "wrong"? What if it's say 25% of people who use it incorrectly? Should you encourage them to use it correctly?
If there are two different ways of using the word and they could be mistaken for each-other that's bad. Once the use of a word has flipped and means something very different from the original (idiot, gay, etc.) then there's no reason to try to return to the original usage. If the usage is still in dispute and the majority of people use the word in the original meaning, I think it's good to discourage people from using the word incorrectly so that people are still able to understand each-other.
I thnik Subcultures and sub-cultural contexts will always exist.
There's always some cases where people have - and prefer- a small or specialist audience.
If you try to discourage it too hard you'll probably end up with more slangs/ patois / creoles emerging. Try to clamp down of business consultant jargon and see what happens, a million worse terms will probably emerge.
Then both groups are correct and the word gets multiple meanings.
Only one individual can use a word incorrectly.
But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word "incorrectly" but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you'd just be on the losing side of the battle historically.
I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.
The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn't sufficient.
But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.
And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.
At least you turned up to the fight.
Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.
Clear communication is so Ohio, I've got rizz.
Or something. I'm too old to make this joke.
You sound like you consider all linguistic evolution to be a bad thing. I'm not saying there shouldn't be opposition to change, indeed opposition helps to filter out pointless change, while worthwhile change will tend to overcome that opposition. So go ahead and be that opposition if you will, but it just seems like a limited perspective to me.
It reminds me of my English teachers at school who impressed upon me that it's incorrect to use the pronouns "they/them" in a singular, non-gender-specific context. So you had to go with the traditional but sexist "he" or an awkwardly pseudo-random distribution of "he" and "she", despite the fact that "they" was in common use colloquially. Perhaps my teachers' fervent opposition was only fueled by the fact that it was a language problem which popular usage had already solved. They were fighting a valiant rearguard action against common sense, and I'm glad they lost.
But, you're just one person. You won't be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you'll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you'd be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don't even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
But, together we're 2 people. And we can recruit more to the army.
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
then it's an unsettled contest between a split community
a language's community isn't bound by any rules: it's free to change a language however it chooses
I've found a language policing minority on here try to pejorate female as derogatory, and I explain to them that by trying to induct sexist presuppositions into the language they're either sexist or playing themselves
A couple things.
First, some languages do have authorities that bound their language by rules. For example, the Académie Française and the Real Academia Española, which work for French and Spanish, respectively. English is an exception, which uses common usage rather than strict “definitions.” So while English is free to change with speakers, some languages do have official groups that make rules about their use.
Second, those who dislike “female” (when used as a noun describing female humans, specifically) aren’t turning the word into a pejorative - they are merely reporting that their experience with the word, when used in that way, expresses derogatory sentiments. The critics aren’t turning it into a “bad word,” the people who use “female” to describe women and girls are already using it to “otherize” and dehumanize half the population. To ignore the way that effect makes women and girls feel, even though they’re the ones being directly affected by such usage, is quite dismissive. I don’t want to throw around the word “mansplaining” willy nilly, but if you’re a man who goes around explaining to women that they shouldn’t be offended by a term that impacts them, but which you have no personal stake in, it might be wise to step back and listen to their experiences.
All natural languages work the same way. Some institution claiming otherwise doesn’t change that.
::: spoiler This analogy fits you. Imagine online activists started condemning usage of the word dutch as a slur. It's bizarre: there is nothing wrong with the dutch, yet they're acting as though we should think so & resist that urge? Why are they propagating problematic presuppositions we don't have about the dutch? Why are they trying to make this official? Are they some special breed of stupid?
Continuing this analogy, they drag you into fights by claiming you're a racist for using the word when you're not actually saying anything offensive about the dutch. You & the rest of society know the word dutch isn't offensive, yet these activists insist it is by pointing to some fringe online community spewing vitriolic propaganda about dutch inferiority specifically using the word dutch. You repudiate their claim by asking why some fringe group irrelevant to wider society gets to decide the meaning of words, but they condemn your "hurtful" language and say you're as bad as them or one of them. Don't be an asshole & use another word like Dutchperson, Netherlander, or Hollander they say: it's the right thing to do & shows socially conscientious, moral rectitude. ::: Yes, they are whether they recognize it or not: from an external, impartial observer, claiming there's a problem with the word female with little regard for context communicates the problem resides in whatever the word itself denotes rather than the contextual meaning.
Our society includes both a minority of sexists & a vast majority of non-sexists who use the word female differently, yet these activists privilege the language & rhetoric of the sexist minority over the non-sexist majority. Why should the sexists get to decide the meaning of words for everyone & the unequal ideas to perpetuate in society? Who does that serve?
Older activists understood that doesn’t serve them and chose to reclaim words like black & queer as words of pride instead. Newer activists would be wise to follow that example: instead of antagonizing non-sexists by treating them as sexists or fulfilling an inferiority complex to establish sexist language as normative, they could try not playing themselves.
The rest you wrote is misguided opinion you'd ironically perpetuate.
Counterfactual. The language community decides the meaning of words through observed usage, and in the preponderance of the community, female is inoffensive. That includes among females themselves. Female is used self-referentially “in-group”: it shows up in feminist book titles, in dating communities (eg, “F4F/M”), classifieds (eg, “need a roommate […] females only”), etc. In conventional language, female is an acceptable word.
Logic has no sex. You'd be wise not to internalize & promote sexism.
3rd world. Anyone that uses the old definiton is being intentionally obtuse. And annoying.
Why would you use that term at all then? If you mean a developing or under-developed country why not say that?
How many is everyone? Are we talking majority rules? Would you like to pit dialects against each other?
It makes little sense to think of language outside of communities, so if a speech community uses a word in a certain way then it's correct in that context.
Of course, most states find it useful to establish an official variant. It is usually based on whatever the ruling class speaks, and is claimed to be 'correct', but there are no objective linguistic criteria which make it possible to say that Parisian French is more correct than e.g. Haitian French.
Literally!
No because I’m not a proud antisemite despite some people’s use of the word
Ok I won't search that one. Explain please
Antisemitism has be co-opted and applied to any and all criticism of Israel, as opposed to it's previous meaning, hatred of Jews/Judaism. This isn't strictly because the meaning of the word is being used differently as much as it is that proponents of Israel like to conflate Israel with all of Judaism, or even more broadly with all Jews (as an ethnic group as opposed to a religious one). Since Israel takes any criticism to be hatred, the inevitable consequence is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I'm splitting hairs here and probably making things more complicated than they need to be... But hopefully you understand what I'm getting at.
Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition "antisemitism" itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because "Semites", or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others... Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.
Well as a Germany I have to be very careful what I say about this topic.
Let's first make clear that the Israeli government and Jews are not the same entity.
Then let me state that I don't care about your religion you can believe in what you want.
Now I can say that I don't agree with the current actions of Israeli government in this war.
Antisemitism should always be the word for the racism against Jews. When people call you that for criticising war actions of the Israeli government then ignore them or give them the Wikipedia article for the word.
Nope. Not even that. [(Open to hearing any reasoning why though.)]
Like was just said [nearly well enough (because not all of them)] in what you replied to:
Imagine how nice it'd be if we mended language, undoing the Orwellianisms. We'd be able to communicate.
Well I just don't like that the meaning gets washed out by this black white thinking. Either you are pro Israel or you are antisemitic.
Yes language changes. And I now don't want to talk about this anymore. I can't do shit about it and it depresses me.
There's something you can do. You shall seek it, find it, and do it.
Even if it's just averting the lie within the lie, and avoiding the language of the oppressor that spreads not just the lie, but the lie within the lie.
Yeah Germany especially are treating terribly their protesting population who don’t want to see children being murdered en masse by a state. Which is HORRIBLY IRONIC.
I think we should bring back philosohoraptor - Morpheus seems wrong for this meme
Guess I'm out of a job.
Who guesses? You? Me? Everyone?
I'm not guessing, I know, they're fired!
Irrigardless
Ain't that the truth!
Not in programming languages.
Unlike humans, the entities who process those aren't capable of mentally compensating on the fly for deviations from the standard so "wrong words" are immediately punished and can't proliferate.
Y'all should check out the ARMA scripting language.
It has a few commands that can be spelled a myriad of ways because of typos made when writing the language. Like "Dammage."
Those just invent new frameworks every six months which everyone should totally use this new framework, for reasons. Though, maybe that's just JavaScript.
Definitely not just JavaScript.
Any where they they let you define your own function are asking for trouble.
def add(a,b){ return(a-b) }
I think you need to use assembly code to stop this b.s.
Yeah, that only happens after an update.
I have such a kneejerk reaction to say “lectern” when people say “podium” that when they really do mean “podium” I have to correct myself. 😅
Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.
That is literally unbelievable.
I will fight lexicon for the most petty of reasons. Idgaf
That's so yeet
Fascist
::: spoiler Needs text alternative. Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative:
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images. ::: yes, conventions (which include natural language) work that way: the community of users sets the convention
what if I told you images can have alt text?
Like aks instead of ask? The Internet tried hard to convince me, but I'm still not convinced, sorry!
It's called "metathesis". We did it over hundreds of years with 'bird' which was originally 'brid' or 'bridd', and 'wasp' which was originally 'waps', apparently.
In German it's also Wespe, but in my local Austrian dialect it's pronounced Wepsn. Very interesting, I didn't know that shift had happened (or I guess not happened) elsewhere.
I thought "wasp" came from the Norman word "wespe" (French word guespe then later guêpe), but is that not true? Or do we just not know and these are possible explanations but there is no consensus?
So, disclaimer here that I'm not a linguist, I just enjoy learning about linguistics.
OED doesn't have a Norman ancestor for English wasp - it goes back through Old English (wæfs, wæps, wæsp) to Saxon and Middle German/Dutch all the way back to pre-Germanic.
My guess here was that there's a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor and Wiktionary, FWIW, agrees - they provide a reconstructed P.I.E word: *wóbʰseh₂ (“wasp”)
ETA: here's the link to the OED online's etymology page and a screenshot of it if you don't have access through your library.
Thanks a lot for the answer! Quite interesting that the Proto-Indo-European word could have been something close to wasp, only for English to go through the waps->wasp that you explained in your previous post.
Well, one fewer false "fact" to believe in, many more to go!
I will be using bird and wasps, thank you very much
That's...my point?
Looks like aks was the original pronunciation
https://youtu.be/dzmmx_v_4fM?t=429
It's incorrect for Academic English but not AAVE, there's more than one version of the language.
classic case of the four-leaved-clover story
edit:
I am just Decimated by this argument!
Really begs the question of what language even means
I have a theory
nice
It is a social construct
...and I find that double plus good.
Prescriptivists should be shoved into all the lockers in the world.
"aks" will always grate, don't care how 'popular' it is
As somebody who still insists that emo means Rites of Spring and not Paramore, no.
I don't care what the original creator said. Gif is pronounced Gif, and peanut butter is peanut butter.
But I say paynit bertter.
Thankfully it was named after the peanut butter and given a nice slogan to boot so you always know how to pronounce it properly!
Yeah, I lucked out with my push to get people to use "lucked out" properly.
Lucked out means you were unlucky ffs, but no half of America is so brain dead it's now acceptable to use it in reverse.
What if they all use it 'wrong' but all use it differently?
Would've
It really depends on the context - like it's hilarious in my culture when people ask what team I'm rooting for
The language we use today is a bastardization of how language was. Every complaint you make about people using language wrong someone has made about the language you are using. And they complained first
Cool
Your right
Not for philosophical or scientific terminology.
I thought that certain languages (I want to say French?) do not work this way.
They all work the same way. Some institution saying otherwise doesn't chance that.
Well that rather shuts down that potentially interesting conversation thread.
What would the conversation be about exactly? Legitimacy of language institutions, or?
I'm not interested in fighting you.
I'm not interested in fighting you either, I was just asking, perhaps the interesting conversation still could've occurred. (Admittedly that other reply to you is really good and extensive, and I wouldn't have much to add after that.)
This is not the first time I hear someone singling out French for this and I kind of wonder why.
Yes, there is a prescriptive institution "Académie Française" and yes it has had an influence on the normalisation of French in the past (like, 400 years ago).
No, linguistically, it does not work that simply (French is not prescriptivist), and it's been a while since anyone gave a damn what this institution says. French marches on, and the Académie is largely regarded as an illegitimate group of old men who try to force a classicist and artificial version of the language of their own making. They also have other missions which aren't about prescribing usage, but that's not what you usually hear about.
Also no, this institution no longer dictates what "proper" French is, and by that I mean it does not dictate it "legally" anymore. It never did, linguistically speaking.
And finally, I don't know why it is that French is the language always used when it comes to descriptivism vs prescriptivism. From my admittedly limited knowledge, it looks to me like at least in western Europe, English is the exception rather the rule regarding this. Other countries and languages have had prescriptivist institutions propped up in the past to try and dictate usage of the language.
In all cases, whatever they say does not automatically become gospel. You can make a point that such institutions can suggest usages, but they can't force them. Like the other commenter said, this is not how languages work. Ultimately, whatever the institutions say, if the people don't use it this way, then the institution is wrong.
Lots of French creoles and patois across the ex-French-empire. The French authorities can define it as not "French" if they don't like it, but I doubt the speakers care.
Damn right. Also, to the address of my far too numerous fellow Frenchmen from metropolitan France who are irritated by your post and mine above: Swiss French is French, Belgian French is French, Quebec French is French, Cajun is French, and so are the multitude of other ones the post above mentions, and if you don't accept it, please listen to "La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part" from Georges Brassens. He has something to say about you.
Flammable & inflammable
Biannual & semiannual
Literally & literally
I thought it's gallonally in the US.. what's a liter?
A quart that travelled to Europe to ‘find itself’.
Oh, that's easy. A liter is what you buy bottled water by and you buy soda pop in 2 liter bottles. Wine and whisk(e)y is 750ml bottles. It's also the displacement of your car's engine. Though we use cc's for chainsaws and motorcycles, weird I know.
So Americans are well familiar with a liter.
I just think skibidibi just sounds neat!
C'mon biologists, name a newly discovered spider species A. skibidius
It just shows how little society is anchored in reason. And people wonder why politicians don't take them serious. People who can't maintain structure and are easily swayed by group think can be made to believe anything.
What if I told you that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks except in rare circumstances?
Don't care. If the "quotation" is inside the sentence, it also doesn't have punctuation.
So I am not going to "follow your rules about punctuation in quotation marks".
American spotted. 🎯
Justifiying ignorance is just ignorance. You are stupid.
U MAD, bruh?
Well six, seven to you too.
Together we have now changed the English language to accept six, seven as part of it. Welcome to the wonderful world of linguistics.
And "6 7" is a shibboleth, a linguistic phenomenon that's been going on for as long as we have written history, essentially, it's just now that it's the youngins doing the thing, it's bad. Yeah, you right, pretty shitty take.
Gotteeeeeem!
Oh.. my lord... I would bet 1 trillion dollars that OP was public schooled in America.
Im homeschooled in America
Nah. When people use medical terminology to stigmatize and dehumanize people, they are using words wrong. When people use the word for a class of person as an insult, they are using words wrong. When people speak in bad faith, they are using words wrong.
Totalitarian newspeak propaganda.