[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
10 Misconceptions About English
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[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
10 Misconceptions About English
[Think you have a link that’s IMAO-worthy? Send it to harvolson@gmail.com. If I use your link, you will receive High Praise! (assuming you remember to put your name in the email)]
I’ll gladly kick in my nit-pickery.
On 10 it mentions decimate originated as “one in ten” or “to tithe” but then says that the original definition “destroy one in ten” isn’t good enough. Since tithe means to give one tenth, how is that a better definition than to destroy one in ten?
Also, the Webster definition seems like a lazy cop-out. I Imagine John Boehner must have writen it so as not to offend one side of the arguement or the other.
English: “Back out with the engine.”
German: “Back with engine out.”
Since most of us Celts are actually about half Saxon by ancestry, no wonder we’re confused!
Webster’s has taken almost a let-it-all-hang-out attitude that annoys the heck out of me. “If people use it that way, then that’s how it’s used” may be a good attitude for a 6th-grader, but the dictionary is supposed to clarity and prevent the erosion of language. If you can’t trust them to be persnickety, whom can you trust? (And no one should literally defend Uncle Joe’s use of the language.)
@3 – from a comment at the link:
Bigwally • 14 days ago
Both The Great Gatsby and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are narrated by fictional characters within the works — Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald, and Tom Sawyer in Twain — not by all-knowing omniscient narrators. Thus, their use of “literally” to mean “figuratively” is part of their fictional personae, part of what makes them — to varying degrees — narrators of questionable reliability. Knowing that “literally” does NOT in fact mean “figuratively” enables readers to grasp some of the ways Fitzgerald and Twain construct their characters. Simply assuming that “literally” can sometimes mean “figuratively” because some well-regarded authors used it that way misses a subtle and clever characterization technique. And don’t get me started on using “quote” when you mean “quotation”!
Hear, hear, Harvey and Bigwally! If literally means figuratively, then it doesn’t mean anything at all.
Thanks, Harvey. Balance Restored!
(Captain Literally vs. the evil OED editors)
In a discussion of language the other day at the office I was offered the following explanation:
English doesn’t borrow from other languages, it follows them down a dark alley and mugs them for loose change.
Neat article, but odd an explanaton of the English language would contain an error this obvious:
“Some believe that it’s wrong to stick a word in between the two and the verb itself …”
I blame global warming.