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2017-06-22, 04:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Wow, I had no idea that in site meant in sight... I thought it was a different way of saying "on site".
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2017-06-22, 08:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
what manner of idiocy is this??
how do you get through your education with any level of degree when you can't tell the difference between you're and your?? I have not been in school for about 2 decades but.. don't negative marks mean anything anymore? I am pretty sure that if I didn't know how to write a flawless sentence, albeit a stupid one, my teachers back in the day would have failed me often and hard enough for me to be held back a year.. and rinse and repeat until I learned it correctly.. Surely if you fail your classes until you get it right, it's bound to stick with you in the end? it takes exactly the same time to write something correctly as it takes to write it spelled badly.. and I'm not talking about dyslexia or other ironically hard words to spell.
not caring, I can sorta understand... but not knowing any better when it comes to words and phrases that are present in pretty much every sentence you would find yourself uttering... it's paramount to not knowing how to spell your given name.. (which of course opens an entire new chapter of things that make me go ... american naming conventions that allow for.. shall we say, creative spelling.. or for names to be used indiscriminately for either sex... or for names that are quite simply made up as if the parents had pulled random letter tiles from a bag in a game of Scrabble... )
edit: this reminds me of a friend whose mother is a complete idiot... said mother has named her daughter by flipping her own given name around... kind of like if my name was Frank and I called my firstborn Knarf.... seriously !
except people like me, who'd qualify as a convert, also balk at people who don't know how to spell things in their own language... which is really a much rarer occurrence in the first place.
so... people are proud of their spelling attrocities and will accuse you of being a bloody foreigner if you happen to spell it correctly?
this... how do you not headbut people in the teeth when they use such an argument?
It seems to me that if someone corrects one's spelling, only an inveterate ignoramus would double down and defend their blunders that way. small wonder that now alternative facts gain traction, if the mindset of the general public leans that way.
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2017-06-22, 08:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Because headbutting people in the teeth is very risky, as far as getting your skin split open and infections, I guess.:P
It seems to me that if someone corrects one's spelling, only an inveterate ignoramus would double down and defend their blunders that way. small wonder that now alternative facts gain traction, if the mindset of the general public leans that way.
I certainly did it a lot of times I can't even recall.Avatar by KwarkpuddingThe subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
Whoever makes shoddy beer, shall be thrown into manure - town law from Gdańsk, XIth century.
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2017-06-22, 09:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
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2017-06-22, 10:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
That knowledge is rather specifically English language related. It wouldn't actually matter that much for a typical maths or physics course. In the UK, at least, they don't really start to test your ability to communicate ideas in non-language subjects until you do A levels (I don't know what the equivalent in your country would be), which not all pupils do.
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2017-06-22, 10:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Sorry gentleman, I'll be 49 years old tomorrow but until this year when someone corrected me in this Forum I didn't know the difference.
I'm actually envious (I would have written "jealous" before I learned the difference in this thread) of the priveledge you gentleman have.
I remember my school days as mostly learning how to dodge, duck, and parrot, very little grammar or spelling was taught.
And for the record we were tested but no one was held back, just sent to different classes.
In my first year of high school the "English" class I was assigned to mostly had us listen to the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., when my mom found out she insisted that I by sent to the other "track" English class. Since they had assigned seating, and unlike my earlier class all the seats were full, so on most days I had to stand or sit on the floor.
That and that we didn't merit toilet paper in our bathrooms, but if I walked 20 minutes to City Hall, or 30 minutes to the University they had some, and that education was a privilege and that not all of us would get the same ration of it is the lesson I learned from my school days.
I still well remember being told by one of the rich hill kids that I "obviously" couldn't actually live in the town I spent half my life in because I never heard of a Ski shop that "everyone" knew of.
But you're right I probably did miss a lot as for most of the last years of school, I skipped classes and went to the public library 15 minutes away instead.
The library had books. I loved to read, and I really didn't want to spend my time at the "pep rallies", or to be assaulted in "PE" and practice ducking and dodging anymore.
The library also has restrooms with actual doors.
It would have been nice to have someone I could have asked to better explain what I was reading meant, but from experience I knew that if I tried to ask in school the answer would be "shut up, and don't bother me".
That was my education.
(I must be in a "mood", because I have tears while I write this)
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2017-06-22, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
This may old or distorted information, but bad notes do not block you from advancing your studies in Great Britain. You do not need to repeat years if you didn't learn anything during the courses, like how to spell, count etc. Instead, you are put into a class with other bad students. You get a note at the end of your studies according to an exam that will make your chances of employability/admission, and that's it. There's much freedom in how different schools handle this, however, and there is a very slim chance of having to repeat a year.
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2017-06-22, 01:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Not atrictly a misuse and it doesn't really bother me, but does the way Tolkien uses the word "shire" strike anyo e else as odd? At times it sounds like they're in some kind of weird high fantasy version of The Prisoner
"Where am I?"
"In The Shire...""If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2017-06-22, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I think one important distinction people need to remember is that native speakers learn to speak their language years before they learn to write it. As a result, the pronunciation may take precedence when typing quickly even when they actually know the difference when they stop to think.
In contrast, us non-natives had to learn the grammar and spelling first, and we will often have to keep perfecting pronunciations for years afterwards. We are more likely to spell "you're" the right way because we think of it as "you are", which we learned before we learned to contract it. Same thing with, for instance, "should have". We learn how to spell it years before we learn that "have" is pronounced a bit like "of" in this context.
I have to agree with Grey Wolf though. When I am around native speakers of my language online, they make similar mistakes as native English speakers. It's not language or culture related, I think.
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2017-06-22, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
This system clearly works, or your universities wouldn't be ranked consistently at the top in most fields, whilst Italy trails behind and has a serious issue of disconnect between school and the professional world..but it does baffle me quite a bit.
Apologies...I did not intend to bring such strong emotions up, especially since this is, for me, little more than a pet peeve
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2017-06-22, 03:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Are you from the UK? If not, that might explain it--we're entirely used to the word "shire" being used for a smaller administrative subdivision of the country as a whole, so the only oddity we find in the name is that there only appears to be one Shire in the whole of Middle-earth!
If you are from the UK, no idea why you'd find his usage odd, sorry.
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2017-06-22, 03:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
On the subject of poisonous vs venomous:
I'm pretty sure that people have been talking about "poisonous snakes" etc at least since the time of Shakespeare, so I'm rather sceptical of the claim that that is incorrect usage.
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2017-06-22, 04:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
It's just like calling a city The City, or a kingdom The Kingdom, or a polity The Polity.
I don't think it's unreasonable, especially if it's either the only or else the most significant one around (in which case it probably began as a nickname that became formalised by long use).
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2017-06-22, 04:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I see now. Well, it wouldn't really be a linguistics thread if I didn't misinterpret something.
I'm aware of the distinction y'all make between the two, I'm just quite comfortable using meter to mean distance as well - "meter" doesn't really have any specific connotation, so it's useful for both meanings. The proper usage of "metre" is covered by the other spelling, so it's unnecessary.
Probably in the same way that people fail to capitalize the first word in their sentences and misuse punctuation.
You mean tantamount, not paramount.
The US doesn't have any real rules about names, aside from "whatever you write on the birth certificate", so "naming conventions" might be a somewhat misleading term to use. I suppose it's possible for a bureaucrat to reject one, but that strikes me as pretty unlikely. I've certainly never heard of it happening here.
Some of them, I'm sure. Or they'll at least accuse you of being a snob or a grammar nazi.Avatar by FinnLassie
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2017-06-22, 04:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
It's one of those things that's fine in colloquial use but you feel it ought to have an official name as well, even if it's never used in conversation. (the Shire, that is; I was overtaken by a ninja)
Though that set me off on another train of thought, and though not strictly a language misuse so much as a historical/stylistic inaccuracy, I always cringe slightly when historical dramas refer to "Emperor Charles V of Spain" - especially when this is used as an official introduction or the like. For those in the know, the chap commonly called Charles V was indeed Emperor Charles V [of the Holy Roman Empire/Germany/the West]* and was also King of Spain [strictly, King of Algeciras, the Algarves, Aragon, Castile, Cordoba, Galicia, Gibraltar, Granada, Jaén, Jerusalem, León, Mallorca, Menorca, Murcia, Navarre, Sardinia, Seville, the Two Sicilies, Toledo, Valencia, and the Canaries, but sometimes just "Spain" for the sake of brevity] - but he wasn't the fifth King Charles of Spain*, nor was he, formally, Emperor of Spain, so the conflated title is all over the place.
I do understand why they do it, to be fair. Charles mostly crops up with his Spanish "hat" on, since that's the part of his vast empire he spent most time dealing with, and the false title emphasises that while also establishing him as an Emperor (and therefore Europe's Top Guy) but it always niggles at me a bit.
*indeed, he was Charles I of all his Spanish kingdoms.Last edited by Aedilred; 2017-06-22 at 04:29 PM.
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2017-06-22, 04:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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2017-06-22, 05:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I get that, it's the lack of specificity that sounds odd. It's always just "the shire" even when they're talking to people not from there and so it sounds, again, kind of like the opening to The Prisoner where #6 asks where he is and #2 simply replies "in the village" with no further explanation; which technically answers the question but in a weird noncommital way that provides little actual information
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2017-06-22, 05:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Except in his world there's an actual location called "the Shire." Like, if there was a village in England named The Village, then it would be perfectly fine to say, "I'm from The Village," even if it were otherwise odd or vague-sounding. It would give very exact information. Specifically, which village you were from - The Village.
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2017-06-22, 05:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Well, Farmer Giles lived in Ham. Not Nottingham, not Bleedingham, not Gotham, not Birmingham. Just Ham. I guess Tolkien liked this sort of things.
Also, +1 for the Charles V thing. It's somewhere with calling the French colonies French empire - a concept with another specialized use in historiography.Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2017-06-22, 07:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I'm dyslexic and this whole thread triggers me.
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2017-06-22, 08:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Charles V is also to my knowledge the only european monarch whose number is pronounced in latin-ish in french, probably to distinguish him from Charles V the Wise, king of France. So if you ever hear about Charles Quint he's that guy.
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2017-06-22, 11:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Not bothered by it at all. It's just a clear and elegant indication that the residents are so isolated and provincial that it's the only shire they know.
It's worth remembering that in The Shire there is a stream called The Water that flows down from The Hill. And that they named the new row "New Row".
[Even if the hobbits in Bywater called it Sharkey's End.]Last edited by Jay R; 2017-06-23 at 12:00 AM.
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2017-06-23, 01:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
This happens in real life too. In Norway at least there are tons of names of place names (and surnames taken from these place), that translate to 'hill', 'mountain', 'valley', 'clearing/farm','waterfall', etc. The explanation is that when these places were named they were the only instance of note in the vicinity so the locals didn't need to specify which hill/valley/mountain/farm etc. These are also generally the oldest names around because when you had to differentiate between them you already had the original unspecified form. It would not surprise me to learn this state of affairs was also the case for England and other places, and I would not be surprised if Tolkien knew this as well even if it is a phenomenon that for some reason is restricted to Norway.
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2017-06-23, 01:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
The same applies in English. We have Sahara Desert (which basically means Desert Desert, since Sahara is an Anglicisation of the Arabic word for desert), rivers Tyne and Avon (which both mean River River but in different original languages), and of course Torpenhow (hill hill hill).
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2017-06-23, 02:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
... says the poster without using an initial capital, and using a doubled punctuation mark...
Teachers in most subjects that aren't English have, for a long time, been first actively discouraged, and more recently explicitly forbidden, from marking students down for simple errors in spelling and grammar. The student is expected to "show understanding" of their subject, and everything else is excluded.
(It's tempting to blame the National Curriculum for this, but the inconvenient truth is, the movement was under way long before then. It was already a hot topic by the late 70s, when I got to secondary school.)
Indeed."None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned. A natural result of these conditions is, that we consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor’s pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound." - Mark Twain
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2017-06-23, 02:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Well, Charles was Spanish by ancestry and birth, so "of Spain" could refer to his origins rather than his official title. (Like "John of Gaunt", so called because he was born in Ghent, even though that province didn't feature in his impressive list of official titles.)
And Charles' official title (as Anglicised) was certainly "Emperor Charles V", so that's not incorrect either. There was only one person in Europe at that time who was generally known as "Emperor", so really there's no need to say what he's the emperor of - the only possible ambiguity is in whether you're talking about the current Holy Roman Emperor, or some predecessor or pretender to that role.
Also under his reign, the Empire was effectively split (he himself formally divided it into two parts on his abdication), with the western (loyal Catholic) portion being dominated by Spain in the same way as North America is dominated by the United States. So after his abdication, calling him "of Spain" becomes even more natural."None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned. A natural result of these conditions is, that we consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor’s pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound." - Mark Twain
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2017-06-23, 02:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I live in Italy.
My address used to be a side-lane (which was indicated as number/letter ) to Via del Dosso, which means Hill road (because I live on top of a hill)... then, less than 10 years ago, they had to rename my bit of the road when more buildings were built on it... they named it Via del Poggio.. which also translates as Hill road.
so now I live on top of a hill, in Hill road, off Hill road.
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2017-06-23, 02:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
I could blame at least for some of these the fact that I was writing on a cellphone and predictive text occasionally does mess up (specifically, sometimes it uses capitalisation correctly, sometimes it doesn't and it's an easy thing to miss on a small-ish screen).
Then I could say that my point was aimed at native English speakers, which I am not by a long shot (English is in fact the 4th language I learned).
What I will do instead is accept the criticism and try to do better in the future... which is my way of countering the argument that people who are corrected tend to double down on their mistakes and spin it into some weird nationalistic argument.
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2017-06-23, 05:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
Even better when you realize some people want there to be a Torpenhow Hill. Knowing nothing more than what a throwaway line from my supervisor at uni gave me and a quick wiki search, the hypothesis that Torpen means 'hill top' rather than 'hill hill' does make sense to me, given that "penn" is commonly considered to mean 'head', making it only a double tautological name. People don't generally give multiple tautological names in a single language. Rather they add identifiers in their own language to elements from unknown languages. I've seen it in English referring to Norwegian places, like "Ekeberg mountain" (not just the joke movie thing) or "Jostedalen valley" (berg = 'big hill/part of a mountain/[sometimes] bedrock', dal= cognate of 'dale', meaning valley). Presumably some ancient Norsemen were learning the names of local English geographical notables and were told something was Torrpenn and added haug to tell Norse speakers that it was a hill they were talking about.
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2017-06-23, 07:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you
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