^ I don't think this is any more complicated than that not everyone gets conjugation, participles, tenses, infinitives, particles, etc.
"Ask" as a noun
- Thread starter LaxScrutiny
- Start date
isee a lot of stuff like this in my store. "Bake" and "boil" turned into nouns was bad enough...but, hell, now they have "cheese" as a verb.
It's enough to make you cheesed off, I guess?
I would have thought the same thing about "I seen" rather than "I saw" before I started at my current job.
A friend was confused when visiting relatives in the South, and they kept asking her, "Jeetyet?" (Did ya/you eat yet?)
I'm somewhat annoyed by the increasing tendency to write "apart" to mean "a part," when it actually has a completely different meaning. As in, "We're so glad you're apart of our team."I tried explaining it to a coworker, and I was met by blank stare.
Kor
Keep in mind many of those instances could be spellcheck/autocorrect errors.
Whenever I hear learning as a noun, I hear Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies. I done got me some learning at school today.
Bah... I'm good with alright, just as much as I am with already or altogether. They have grown to have different applications as much as all ways & always.
I'm all ready already. We're altogether enjoying it, all together. I was all right about being alright.
Don't even get me started on albeit
It's enough to make you cheesed off, I guess?
Meh, I’ll get over it. It’s all gouda.
I recently re-watched Pierre Trudeau's "fuddle-duddle" video (someone else made it, of course) just to hear a politician make excuses that were mostly grammatically correct.
There's a guy from somewhere in the U.S. who decided to use "fuddle-duddle" in place of "fuck" in his gaming forum's autocensor.
That's just... beyond bizarre.
I'm reminded of a vitriolic argument I got into with a few people back in 2009 (they didn't like my opinions of the first nuTrek movie). There are times when I go into "Spock mode" when posting. My grammar is as perfect as I can manage, sentences are crisp, and everything is punctuated correctly.Argh… ask is a noun now? Ah well. Okay.
It’s such a hopeless battle… once I finally manage to get the hang of the latest “hey, there’s a new use for this word that makes very little sense but everybody is doing it so it’s probably better to adapt” it has already been replaced by something else.
Would someone think of those of us who aren’t native speakers of the English language please?
The reaction one person had was weird. He thought my first language wasn't English.
This was as weird 13 years ago as it was last week on a gaming forum when someone ranted at me about my not being a native English speaker. The forum admin asked for feedback and I gave her some about a couple of technical issues.
There have been other instances, but at least one guy simmered down when I explained that I became a Star Trek fan at the impressionable age of 12 and had strict English teachers in school and college. By the time I went online nearly 30 years later, my habits were fairly well entrenched.
That sounds like something that would only make sense on Arrakis, if you could ask someone if they've been put through the death-still and rendered down for their body's water. That would have to be a somewhat metaphysical conversation, though, as an affirmative answer would mean the person was dead.
From episode 2 of The Story of English.Otherwise we should all still be speaking the original English of Beowulf.
"Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum, monegum mǣgðum meodo-setla oftēah. Egsode eorlas, syððan ǣrest wearð fēasceaft funden: hē þæs frōfre gebād, wēox under wolcnum, weorð-myndum ðāh, oð þæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymb-sittendra ofer hron-rāde hȳran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs gōd cyning!"
This is my favorite episode of this documentary series. It's a 9-part series about the history of the English language, and though some of it is extremely dated at this point (no pun intended), I still enjoy it.
This episode is special because it gets into Beowulf, there's a musical rendition of part of that work, and toward the end we're treated to Mary Tamm (who played the first Romana in Doctor Who) being coached in how to correctly pronounce the words in The Canterbury Tales (for an audio version).
I'm not sure if there's any site where you can see the entire series. YT would be the best bet.
Back in the '80s and '90s I had a home typing business. Most of my clients were college and university students, and hindsight has made me grateful that the worst I had to contend with was messy handwriting and one guy who absolutely insisted that he really did want to include a very vulgar sentence in one of his term papers (I warned him that his instructor wouldn't be impressed, and she wasn't; I hope the fun he got out of it was worth the grade deduction).
I don't know if I could have handled internet slang and urban slang in those days. I remember how hard it was to force myself to type "teh" when I began to get serious about making lolcat captions.
Fast-forward a decade or more, though... both the Bible and at least some of Shakespeare have been translated into lolspeak. Someone even translated an entire episode of Star Trek, complete with kitten-themed "commercials".
Kirk didn't say "groovy" but Roberta Lincoln did in "Assignment: Earth".
I use that word now, as a way of expressing sarcasm. If you ever spot it in any of my posts around the forum, chances are that I was not in a good mood at the time I typed it.
I don't understand why people think spell checkers are the final authority. They're only as accurate as whoever programmed them. Try being a Canadian who is used to using a variety of British, American, indigenous, and French spellings for particular words, and as far as Canadians are concerned, they're all correct. The American-programmed spell checker, however, thinks I've made a mistake and gives me one of those obnoxious little red squiggly lines underneath perfectly acceptable words."Alright" has been in use for over 150 years [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alright].
I think it's more than alright to use it. Spell-check has no objection.
So it's still correct to use them when referring to the residents of my apartment, then. My cat is a person.
I just don't understand why people use autocorrect if it keeps getting things wrong. A CBC journalist whined to me in an email about it when I emailed him to let him know how unimpressed I was with the number of mistakes in his article.
I really don't care. He's being paid to be a professional journalist. I suppose proofreaders are a relic of the past, but there really isn't any excuse.
I didn't say it was. All it means is that the spelling is in its dictionary. I cited a well-established and reputable dictionary in addition to that, and I didn't claim that was the final authority either.
I think the thing about spellcheckers is, people use them. If there is a common error, such as then/than that spellcheckers miss, it becomes even more common and accepted.
That's not the fault of the spellchecker. In that example, the spellchecker misses nothing, because both are words spelled correctly. The problem there is in expectation by the user that the spellchecker functions as a grammar checker. If it's just a spellchecker, it doesn't.
Totally agree, up to a point. Writing requires at least a bit of effort to use appropriate words, tone, and intent. It's fine to use spellcheck and grammar checking but pay attention, learn as you go, and care about what you write. (Not directing this at you personally.)
That kind of satire has been going on for ages. Mad magazine did the same thing back in the 1960s when they "translated" Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy into beatnik slang.
I miss Mad Magazine. I know it is still online; I mean the good-old newsprint with a fold-in back-page cover. Sigh.
ETA: And Damn!! There are actually new issues on paper that come in the post!! I'm all in!
ETA: And Damn!! There are actually new issues on paper that come in the post!! I'm all in!
Last edited:
Beatnik slang doesn't come with cute cats and kittens.
Similar threads
