It would definitely be dreamed and learned where I'm from, not dreamt or learnt.
On the thread topic more generally, I used to be so uptight about English usage and have a ton of pet peeves, but the older I get the more I find they are falling away in favour of a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, approach to language. I'm now much more in the camp that language is about communication and if your usage effectively communicates your message, that's far more important than any standardization or rules. Which makes me a bit boring on a thread like this one, I guess.
"I dreamed I saw St Augustine" (Bob Dylan on John Wesley Harding) comes to mind. It's never worried me. Perhaps it's poetic usage (or song usage for those that dispute that BD is a poet).
Also "beg the question" to mean "prompt the question."
And dangling modifiers: "Walking into church, the smell of incense overwhelmed me" instead of "Walking into church, I was overwhelmed by the smell of incense."
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For this reason I use -ed if writing anywhere with international visibility, like here, and I suspect other British English writers might be doing that for that reason, hence it becoming an acceptable alternative over here.
It would definitely be dreamed and learned where I'm from, not dreamt or learnt.
On the thread topic more generally, I used to be so uptight about English usage and have a ton of pet peeves, but the older I get the more I find they are falling away in favour of a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, approach to language. I'm now much more in the camp that language is about communication and if your usage effectively communicates your message, that's far more important than any standardization or rules. Which makes me a bit boring on a thread like this one, I guess.
I had the same epiphany some years ago. I tend towards pedantry naturally but it's inappropriate in the field of first language usage.
Some people seem to feel very threatened by descriptive approaches. I can't help feeling that it's because we're perceived as saying "all that stuff you learned about split infinitives and use of I vs me in compound subjects and objects? You were wasting your time." Of course this isn't quite right - there are purposes for which you are required to use this particular formalised and Latinised form of English. However, these forms are not the only "correct" ones whilr deviation from them is wrong - they are merely conventions for some formal forms of writing.
The person who says "Me and John want to really get this sorted" is not "wrong". They are merely not using the formal register.
A lot of these ships have sailed anyway. I'd imagine that if we gathered together every use of "beg the question" in a day, more than 90% of them would mean "inviting the question" (which is the literal meaning of the words, for God's sake - people are being told they're wrong for thinking about what the words actually mean!) and a tiny percentage referring to the formal logic failure.
You could probably say that all the ships have sailed, (reply to Karl). When people complain about a certain usage, it usually means that that usage is established. Of course, some forms disappear, but not through disapproval. Still, shouting at clouds is fun.
You could probably say that all the ships have sailed, (reply to Karl). When people complain about a certain usage, it usually means that that usage is established. Of course, some forms disappear, but not through disapproval. Still, shouting at clouds is fun.
Quite.
Usage pedantry down the ages:
1300 - methinks thyss new politick use of ye and you, meaning but one person morre hyghe in his position, doth but shewe the rustick lacke of understanding bye the speaker of hys owne Tonge!
1600 - thou fool! "You"? sayst thou? That is the objective case; why dost thou abuse it as subject when the correckt form is "ye"?
1700 - what degradation of our language is shown by he who extends the deferential use of the plural second person pronoun to men of all classes, reserving not its use for his betters, as befits both the language and the very stability of our society? I shall speak not "you" unto my manservant nor my groom; "thou" he is to me!
No attempt to accurately reproduce the middle and early modern English of these dates intended.
Literally and virtually in the same sentence - even phrase - is something that I expect is coming!
We understand that refreshing the host hardware isn't cheap but you have to compare the cost of physical servers. We literally implemented our datacentre virtually to save money!
Good stuff, Karl. I do wonder if prescriptivism increased with the rise of the middle class, and mass education. Probably, this was accompanied by efforts to school the unwashed by their betters, so snobbery has been a factor. But this is guesswork.
Good stuff, Karl. I do wonder if prescriptivism increased with the rise of the middle class, and mass education. Probably, this was accompanied by efforts to school the unwashed by their betters, so snobbery has been a factor. But this is guesswork.
Snobbery is a strong word, but using Standard English as opposed to any other dialect *and* RP became a class marker.
SE and RP themselves are just a formalised version of a particular dialect and a particular accent that happened to be in the right place at the right time. SE is in fact an amalgam of that prestige dialect with a few entirely spurious rules (like the split infinitives one) thrown in by grammarians basing their understanding on Latin. It formalised a few (what became) shibboleths that were more or less observed by some people and not others - distinctions between lay/lie, may/can, fewer/less - and declared some "right" and some "wrong".
I have to bear this in mind consciously as reflexives as simple pronouns still sound wrong to me, unless part of Irish English, in which case "Is that yourself there?", "I though it was herself!" sound perfectly fine.
I have a Facebook friend who usually begins posts describing something that she and her husband have done with "Myself and Frank went ..."
I'm fairly certain that if she were saying it, she'd say, "Frank and I went ...", so why not write that?
We don't write how we speak. Writing tends to be more formal. Because it's become commonplace to use reflexives in this way in the workplace (see discussion above) it's crept into other forms of written communication.
Here is a sentence from a western,
"He turned in the saddle and literally decimated his opponent."
That's fine. We all know what those words mean now, regardless of their etymology.
Do 'we'? I don't know what that means.
The 'literally' is fairly straightforward. It adds nothing and doesn't appear to mean anything at all. It might have been added with the idea that it gives some sort of emphasis, but it contributes no more than an extra ',like,' there would.
But what does the 'decimated' mean there? The opponent is singular. So there's only one of them. I assume it isn't intended to mean 'removed one tenth of'. If so, which tenth, the head, most of one of the legs, or what? Even if it's meant loosely to mean 'remove approximately 90% of' it still doesn't make sense. It's difficult to see how the opponent could survive with 90% missing.
Is it meant to mean 'killed so emphatically that the opponent was left physiologically dismembered' or 'did so much damage the opponent was out of the fight', or what?
Here is a sentence from a western,
"He turned in the saddle and literally decimated his opponent."
That's fine. We all know what those words mean now, regardless of their etymology.
Do 'we'? I don't know what that means.
The 'literally' is fairly straightforward. It adds nothing and doesn't appear to mean anything at all. It might have been added with the idea that it gives some sort of emphasis, but it contributes no more than an extra ',like,' there would.
But what does the 'decimated' mean there? The opponent is singular. So there's only one of them. I assume it isn't intended to mean 'removed one tenth of'. If so, which tenth, the head, most of one of the legs, or what? Even if it's meant loosely to mean 'remove approximately 90% of' it still doesn't make sense. It's difficult to see how the opponent could survive with 90% missing.
Is it meant to mean 'killed so emphatically that the opponent was left physiologically dismembered' or 'did so much damage the opponent was out of the fight', or what?
I thought it was pretty obvious he meant the last of those.
I pretty much agree with everything @KarlLB has said about descriptive vs prescriptive approaches to language. I would say this has probably been the biggest shift in my thinking over my life -- moreso than any religious or political changes of viewpoint or anything -- becoming a hardcore descriptivist when it comes to spoken language. And it's been a pretty recent change in thinking -- within the last 5 years or so.
For me, thinking about how the dialect that's naturally used by most people where I come from is often denigrated and mocked, started me on a path that led to thinking that in almost every situation, being a "grammar Nazi" (or, I guess, a "usage Nazi") as I used to pride myself on being, comes across as racist, classist, and/or ableist. If language communicates its message, it's working. (I do still think it is helpful for people to learn standard usage and grammar so they can adjust their communication style to a particular audience if doing so would be beneficial to them or to the other people involved -- in other words I'm all for teaching people to code-switch though I'd rather it wasn't necessary).
I am still a bit prescriptivist on written vs spoken language -- not in written settings that are intended to be conversational, like Facebook posts or texts, but when you're writing something that is for publication and meant to represent you, your business, or your organization; then I tend to cringe when I see non-standard usage, grammar, or punctuation.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can tell me "I ain't got no reason to argue even though it begs the question of why you done them things," and I'm fine with that because I know what you mean, but misplaced apostrophes on store signs still hurt me a little bit.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
Literally and virtually in the same sentence - even phrase - is something that I expect is coming!
We understand that refreshing the host hardware isn't cheap but you have to compare the cost of physical servers. We literally implemented our datacentre virtually to save money!
Fantastic! Although I was thinking of the incorrect usages - but omitted to say that - d'oh.
Literally and virtually in the same sentence - even phrase - is something that I expect is coming!
We understand that refreshing the host hardware isn't cheap but you have to compare the cost of physical servers. We literally implemented our datacentre virtually to save money!
Fantastic! Although I was thinking of the incorrect usages - but omitted to say that - d'oh.
I don't think incorrect and correct usages exist for these words; they have the range of meanings that the speech community uses them to mean.
Granted it makes Literally a self-antonym but we've coped with "cleave" for centuries. The meaning is generally clear from context.
As for Virtually - well, to me it means either "nearly, tantamount to" or alternatively "artificially emulating" such as virtual reality, or (as in my example) virtual computers - a software environment that looks like physical hardware to the software running on it. What do you think its correct and incorrect uses are?
Of course, the standard reply to criticisms of some uses of "literally", as in my head literally exploded, is that it's being used non-literally. Tolerably amusing.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
Fair enough, and point well taken. I think where the average American, at least in my experience, is likely to have heard “learnt” or “spelt” used by an American is in movies and TV, from characters are uneducated, country folk—hillbillies maybe—who hold on to archaic (in the US) forms like “learnt” or “et” for “ate.”
So I guess what I was trying to say wasn’t so much that a person who writes “learnt” can’t spell, as that an American who uses those spellings/pronunciations is using old forms and didn’t learn “standard English” at school.
Hearing it from someone from the UK doesn’t necessarily raise the same assumptions, as were used to y’all speaking a bit differently.
If that makes any sense, which it well may not, I guess.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
Fair enough, and point well taken. I think where the average American, at least in my experience, is likely to have heard “learnt” or “spelt” used by an American is in movies and TV, from characters are uneducated, country folk—hillbillies maybe—who hold on to archaic (in the US) forms like “learnt” or “et” for “ate.”
So I guess what I was trying to say wasn’t so much that a person who writes “learnt” can’t spell, as that an American who uses those spellings/pronunciations is using old forms and didn’t learn “standard English” at school.
Hearing it from someone from the UK doesn’t necessarily raise the same assumptions, as were used to y’all speaking a bit differently.
If that makes any sense, which it well may not, I guess.
I hadn't realised you pronounced these endings with a d as well as spelt them that way!
I really dislike the phrase "The Great Resignation" to mean the recent supposed trend of people quitting their jobs. Mostly because it bundles up what should be a plural countable noun("resignations"), into a single countable noun.
If there were a non-countable version of "resignation" that would be okay, but transfering it into a single-countable simply doesn't come off, to my sensinilities. Like saying "the widespread accident" to mean there are a lot of accidents.
And I'm racking my brains for a lyric from the wonderful little musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" but nothing's coming to me at the moment.
I suppose that's possible. Do people, actually say 'dreamed' and 'learned' where you are @Gill H, rather than what I'd regard as the more normal 'dreamt' (pronounced 'drĕmt') and 'learnt' (pronounced 'lernt')?
I'm in South Wales. I'm now finding it difficult to think which I hear normally, but I'm pretty sure I hear 'dreamed' and 'learned' fairly often. At work we have 'Lessons Learned Meetings', and going back to musicals again, there's Joseph:
"I dreamed that in the fields one day, the corn gave me a sign..."
That's written by Tim Rice who is English. As for "I dreamed a dream" - the English lyric is by Herbert Kretzmer who was South African living in the UK.
Descriptivism as applied to the difference between received English and other dialects is unproblematic.
Descriptivism as applied to usage within received English has problems. Taken seriously it would imply for example that if a word used for a minority acquires a pejorative secondary meaning there is no sensible objection. Or that there is no sensible objection to the use of management speak. Or that there is nothing to regret in linguistic drift that simply turns words into synonyms of each other.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
Fair enough, and point well taken. I think where the average American, at least in my experience, is likely to have heard “learnt” or “spelt” used by an American is in movies and TV, from characters are uneducated, country folk—hillbillies maybe—who hold on to archaic (in the US) forms like “learnt” or “et” for “ate.”
So I guess what I was trying to say wasn’t so much that a person who writes “learnt” can’t spell, as that an American who uses those spellings/pronunciations is using old forms and didn’t learn “standard English” at school.
Hearing it from someone from the UK doesn’t necessarily raise the same assumptions, as were used to y’all speaking a bit differently.
If that makes any sense, which it well may not, I guess.
I hadn't realised you pronounced these endings with a d as well as spelt them that way!
Of course, the standard reply to criticisms of some uses of "literally", as in my head literally exploded, is that it's being used non-literally. Tolerably amusing.
IIRC the OED cites this use of literally from 1901.
Do people, actually say 'dreamed' and 'learned' where you are @Gill H, rather than what I'd regard as the more normal 'dreamt' (pronounced 'drĕmt') and 'learnt' (pronounced 'lernt')?
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For some American readers, perhaps. For many American readers, “learnt” and “spelt” are read or heard as a pond difference, or as perhaps a bit archaic.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
I don’t know where @Gill H is, but where I am, dreamt and learnt would be very unusual, and learnt might even carry a connotation of lack of education.
Fair enough, and point well taken. I think where the average American, at least in my experience, is likely to have heard “learnt” or “spelt” used by an American is in movies and TV, from characters are uneducated, country folk—hillbillies maybe—who hold on to archaic (in the US) forms like “learnt” or “et” for “ate.”
So I guess what I was trying to say wasn’t so much that a person who writes “learnt” can’t spell, as that an American who uses those spellings/pronunciations is using old forms and didn’t learn “standard English” at school.
Hearing it from someone from the UK doesn’t necessarily raise the same assumptions, as were used to y’all speaking a bit differently.
If that makes any sense, which it well may not, I guess.
I learnt a lesson today from a very learned man. He said that cattle who were worn out from grinding flour needed to be spelled for quite a while.
As for "ate" and "et" - "et" used be a common pronunciation here particularly amongst country people, although the selling remained "ate".
Descriptivism as applied to the difference between received English and other dialects is unproblematic.
Descriptivism as applied to usage within received English has problems. Taken seriously it would imply for example that if a word used for a minority acquires a pejorative secondary meaning there is no sensible objection. Or that there is no sensible objection to the use of management speak. Or that there is nothing to regret in linguistic drift that simply turns words into synonyms of each other.
Sorry, no. That's confusing linguistics with ethics.
That a word used for a minority might have acquired a pejorative secondary meaning may be objectively true. A dictionary should record the usage.
That that makes it OK for people to use the word pejoratively doesn't follow from that. If the usage causes offence, one shouldn't use the word that way. It's as irrelevant that other people might use it offensively as would be the argument that if Fat Puppy breaks his own laws, tells lies about that and virtually everything else and has gone through life habituated to committing adultery that makes all these OK for anyone else.
Furthermore, management speak is a fact. That doesn't stop it from marking its users as having poor use of English skills.
Descriptivism as applied to the difference between received English and other dialects is unproblematic.
Descriptivism as applied to usage within received English has problems. Taken seriously it would imply for example that if a word used for a minority acquires a pejorative secondary meaning there is no sensible objection. Or that there is no sensible objection to the use of management speak. Or that there is nothing to regret in linguistic drift that simply turns words into synonyms of each other.
Sorry, no. That's confusing linguistics with ethics.
That a word used for a minority might have acquired a pejorative secondary meaning may be objectively true. A dictionary should record the usage.
That that makes it OK for people to use the word pejoratively doesn't follow from that. If the usage causes offence, one shouldn't use the word that way. It's as irrelevant that other people might use it offensively as would be the argument that if Fat Puppy breaks his own laws, tells lies about that and virtually everything else and has gone through life habituated to committing adultery that makes all these OK for anyone else.
Furthermore, management speak is a fact. That doesn't stop it from marking its users as having poor use of English skills.
It doesn't even do that. It just illustrates how humans tend to copy the speech habits of those they identify with.
Comments
I don't think houses built consecutively would necessarily be located back to back.
And as for sports games they are more like the back of one game to the front of the next. So maybe the use of back-to-back is back-to-front.
On the thread topic more generally, I used to be so uptight about English usage and have a ton of pet peeves, but the older I get the more I find they are falling away in favour of a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, approach to language. I'm now much more in the camp that language is about communication and if your usage effectively communicates your message, that's far more important than any standardization or rules. Which makes me a bit boring on a thread like this one, I guess.
Also "beg the question" to mean "prompt the question."
And dangling modifiers: "Walking into church, the smell of incense overwhelmed me" instead of "Walking into church, I was overwhelmed by the smell of incense."
The incense didn't walk anywhere.
And of course there's learned with the emphasis on the second syllable.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1535_questionanswer/page50.shtml
The particular thing about these -t/-ed words is that while it's a pond difference, it's not like -our/-or in that to a American reader, -our elicits the response "that's British English spelling", whilst the -t variant appears to elicit the response "this person can't spell". Or in the case of "spelt" , "this person is confusing the past tense of spell with the cereal crop".
For this reason I use -ed if writing anywhere with international visibility, like here, and I suspect other British English writers might be doing that for that reason, hence it becoming an acceptable alternative over here.
I had the same epiphany some years ago. I tend towards pedantry naturally but it's inappropriate in the field of first language usage.
Some people seem to feel very threatened by descriptive approaches. I can't help feeling that it's because we're perceived as saying "all that stuff you learned about split infinitives and use of I vs me in compound subjects and objects? You were wasting your time." Of course this isn't quite right - there are purposes for which you are required to use this particular formalised and Latinised form of English. However, these forms are not the only "correct" ones whilr deviation from them is wrong - they are merely conventions for some formal forms of writing.
The person who says "Me and John want to really get this sorted" is not "wrong". They are merely not using the formal register.
A lot of these ships have sailed anyway. I'd imagine that if we gathered together every use of "beg the question" in a day, more than 90% of them would mean "inviting the question" (which is the literal meaning of the words, for God's sake - people are being told they're wrong for thinking about what the words actually mean!) and a tiny percentage referring to the formal logic failure.
Literally and virtually in the same sentence - even phrase - is something that I expect is coming!
Quite.
Usage pedantry down the ages:
1300 - methinks thyss new politick use of ye and you, meaning but one person morre hyghe in his position, doth but shewe the rustick lacke of understanding bye the speaker of hys owne Tonge!
1600 - thou fool! "You"? sayst thou? That is the objective case; why dost thou abuse it as subject when the correckt form is "ye"?
1700 - what degradation of our language is shown by he who extends the deferential use of the plural second person pronoun to men of all classes, reserving not its use for his betters, as befits both the language and the very stability of our society? I shall speak not "you" unto my manservant nor my groom; "thou" he is to me!
No attempt to accurately reproduce the middle and early modern English of these dates intended.
We understand that refreshing the host hardware isn't cheap but you have to compare the cost of physical servers. We literally implemented our datacentre virtually to save money!
Snobbery is a strong word, but using Standard English as opposed to any other dialect *and* RP became a class marker.
SE and RP themselves are just a formalised version of a particular dialect and a particular accent that happened to be in the right place at the right time. SE is in fact an amalgam of that prestige dialect with a few entirely spurious rules (like the split infinitives one) thrown in by grammarians basing their understanding on Latin. It formalised a few (what became) shibboleths that were more or less observed by some people and not others - distinctions between lay/lie, may/can, fewer/less - and declared some "right" and some "wrong".
I have to bear this in mind consciously as reflexives as simple pronouns still sound wrong to me, unless part of Irish English, in which case "Is that yourself there?", "I though it was herself!" sound perfectly fine.
Here is a sentence from a western,
"He turned in the saddle and literally decimated his opponent."
I'm fairly certain that if she were saying it, she'd say, "Frank and I went ...", so why not write that?
That's fine. We all know what those words mean now, regardless of their etymology.
We don't write how we speak. Writing tends to be more formal. Because it's become commonplace to use reflexives in this way in the workplace (see discussion above) it's crept into other forms of written communication.
The 'literally' is fairly straightforward. It adds nothing and doesn't appear to mean anything at all. It might have been added with the idea that it gives some sort of emphasis, but it contributes no more than an extra ',like,' there would.
But what does the 'decimated' mean there? The opponent is singular. So there's only one of them. I assume it isn't intended to mean 'removed one tenth of'. If so, which tenth, the head, most of one of the legs, or what? Even if it's meant loosely to mean 'remove approximately 90% of' it still doesn't make sense. It's difficult to see how the opponent could survive with 90% missing.
Is it meant to mean 'killed so emphatically that the opponent was left physiologically dismembered' or 'did so much damage the opponent was out of the fight', or what?
Because to the sort of person who says that, it sounds educated. It used be pretty common here.
I thought it was pretty obvious he meant the last of those.
For me, thinking about how the dialect that's naturally used by most people where I come from is often denigrated and mocked, started me on a path that led to thinking that in almost every situation, being a "grammar Nazi" (or, I guess, a "usage Nazi") as I used to pride myself on being, comes across as racist, classist, and/or ableist. If language communicates its message, it's working. (I do still think it is helpful for people to learn standard usage and grammar so they can adjust their communication style to a particular audience if doing so would be beneficial to them or to the other people involved -- in other words I'm all for teaching people to code-switch though I'd rather it wasn't necessary).
I am still a bit prescriptivist on written vs spoken language -- not in written settings that are intended to be conversational, like Facebook posts or texts, but when you're writing something that is for publication and meant to represent you, your business, or your organization; then I tend to cringe when I see non-standard usage, grammar, or punctuation.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can tell me "I ain't got no reason to argue even though it begs the question of why you done them things," and I'm fine with that because I know what you mean, but misplaced apostrophes on store signs still hurt me a little bit.
To be fair, Nick, I also got that impression from you on the previous page:
Fantastic! Although I was thinking of the incorrect usages - but omitted to say that - d'oh.
I don't think incorrect and correct usages exist for these words; they have the range of meanings that the speech community uses them to mean.
Granted it makes Literally a self-antonym but we've coped with "cleave" for centuries. The meaning is generally clear from context.
As for Virtually - well, to me it means either "nearly, tantamount to" or alternatively "artificially emulating" such as virtual reality, or (as in my example) virtual computers - a software environment that looks like physical hardware to the software running on it. What do you think its correct and incorrect uses are?
So I guess what I was trying to say wasn’t so much that a person who writes “learnt” can’t spell, as that an American who uses those spellings/pronunciations is using old forms and didn’t learn “standard English” at school.
Hearing it from someone from the UK doesn’t necessarily raise the same assumptions, as were used to y’all speaking a bit differently.
If that makes any sense, which it well may not, I guess.
I hadn't realised you pronounced these endings with a d as well as spelt them that way!
If there were a non-countable version of "resignation" that would be okay, but transfering it into a single-countable simply doesn't come off, to my sensinilities. Like saying "the widespread accident" to mean there are a lot of accidents.
I'm in South Wales. I'm now finding it difficult to think which I hear normally, but I'm pretty sure I hear 'dreamed' and 'learned' fairly often. At work we have 'Lessons Learned Meetings', and going back to musicals again, there's Joseph:
"I dreamed that in the fields one day, the corn gave me a sign..."
That's written by Tim Rice who is English. As for "I dreamed a dream" - the English lyric is by Herbert Kretzmer who was South African living in the UK.
By the way, you may have a way to go but not a ways.
Descriptivism as applied to usage within received English has problems. Taken seriously it would imply for example that if a word used for a minority acquires a pejorative secondary meaning there is no sensible objection. Or that there is no sensible objection to the use of management speak. Or that there is nothing to regret in linguistic drift that simply turns words into synonyms of each other.
A way to go is a means of transportation or a path to take. A ways to go is a long distance, and has been since at least the 12th Century.
IIRC the OED cites this use of literally from 1901.
Yes it sounds very Ma and Pa Kettle to me.
By what right?
I learnt a lesson today from a very learned man. He said that cattle who were worn out from grinding flour needed to be spelled for quite a while.
As for "ate" and "et" - "et" used be a common pronunciation here particularly amongst country people, although the selling remained "ate".
That a word used for a minority might have acquired a pejorative secondary meaning may be objectively true. A dictionary should record the usage.
That that makes it OK for people to use the word pejoratively doesn't follow from that. If the usage causes offence, one shouldn't use the word that way. It's as irrelevant that other people might use it offensively as would be the argument that if Fat Puppy breaks his own laws, tells lies about that and virtually everything else and has gone through life habituated to committing adultery that makes all these OK for anyone else.
Furthermore, management speak is a fact. That doesn't stop it from marking its users as having poor use of English skills.
It doesn't even do that. It just illustrates how humans tend to copy the speech habits of those they identify with.
I don't think it means that. It means that it's innate, of course used metaphorically.
Metaphor.
I thought an uptick is a small increase, in the stock market. It has spread, that's how language works.