21–30 of 88 posts
How can you "kill" something that constantly evolves? A hundred years ago modern-day "britishisms" would be viewed as "killing the English language". Also, what's "British English"? These two are British English: - received pronunciation with it's "proper English": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIemPxHSb6Q - Glasgoans (??) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le_uNGdpa4c with "bubblin' and greetin'" and other weird stuf…
I think I just hurt my eyes from rolling them so far back in my head. Cultures in contact with each other share words. It goes both ways. A quarter or more of the words in English are outright copied from French... oh, but that happened a long time ago. As an American, I've noticed certain words I associate with British English creeping into our vocabulary as well. In my mind I associate it with Harry Potter and Doct…
Not really, it goes mostly from the direction of the stronger nations to the less strong in the relationship.
And cultures and languages do die out in such processes.
Now, some might find all this inconsequential, but for some of us those things means something (and the fact that historically things change and die anyway isn't more comforting than it is when its told about one's family dying).
What I'm more amazed is how people can lament some latest sequel to a movie franchise "betraying" or losing the spirit of the original or losing its way etc, but at the same time can't understand others that are concerned with whole cultures doing the same.
It's sad to see such bullshit conservatism from someone who has written for bbc and the guardian. This is the kind of arguments that Brexit backers use. "Let's protect the English language! Let's kick all the foreigners out!"
The Spanish cognate 'maravilloso' survives.
We had a tally chart on the wall for anyone who slipped into saying one of them accidentally. I survived for weeks until I rang someone to 'touch base'!
They seemed to have a group policy (or something) that changed the the dictionary in Office back to 'American English' each reboot. I just ignored the coloured (!) underlines and typed the way I wanted as my own personal battle.
I don't actual have a problem with the variant spellings of American English. I have a problem with certain kinds of bad English that happen to seem more prevalent amongst Americans!
1) Verbalisation: "I am hoping to medal in the next Olympics". This sounds to me like they are planning to meddle with it. What is wrong with, "I am hoping to win a medal"?
2) Bi-monthly and bi-weekly. Twice a week or every two weeks? Twice a month or every two months. When you want to hold a meeting every two weeks then perhaps a fortnightly meeting would tell people when they need to be there?
3) Reaching out. To mean making contact. What is wrong with, I wrote to x, I called Y etc.
4) Bootstrapping a business: I get down-voted for this, but this seems to cover everything from, "I'm so rich I didn't need to take outside investment", to "I did this as an add on to my existing business and supported it with our existing funding" to "We started on a server I found in a skip and scaled it up from there until I could quit my job". In most of the cases I have seen it could be replaced with the phrase, "I started a business" without losing any meaning whatsoever.
I should stop annoying you all and do some work
'marvellous' saw something of an ironic renaissance in Australia as a homage to Richie Benaud. The Spanish cognate 'maravilloso' survives.
An interesting phenomenon I've noticed is that a lot of people, and often intelligent people, believe that language that have been evolving for thousands of years should, somehow, just stop evolving today. Interestingly, while one would expect it to be correlated with political belief (conservatives would want language as it was in good old days, progressives would embrace the change) my personal anecdotal evidence s…
If it adds something new to the language, he accepts it. If we already have existing words that do a better job, he rejects it.
This begrudgingly forced him to accept the use of ‘like’ the way teenage girls use it because they don’t mean “this person said”, or “I said”. They mean some more like “this person said something to the effect of”.
I think I just hurt my eyes from rolling them so far back in my head. Cultures in contact with each other share words. It goes both ways. A quarter or more of the words in English are outright copied from French... oh, but that happened a long time ago. As an American, I've noticed certain words I associate with British English creeping into our vocabulary as well. In my mind I associate it with Harry Potter and Doct…
So you haven't read all the article, or at least, engaged with any of its points -- perhaps rolling your eyes forwards may help in the future.
The claim the author makes is that British English will die as a distinctive sort, being subsumed by foreign additions that make little sense to the way we live our lives.