English as She Is Spoke (1884) [pdf]

Post by moloch-hai » Wed, Jan 04, 2023, 5:20 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #124

nerdponx wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Along similar lines, expect a spelling convergence of "wary" and "weary" in the next 5-10 years due to so many people not knowing the difference between the two, not bothering to check, and perpetuating confusion by using the wrong one in their own writing.

> perpetuating confusion "Perpetrate" and "perpetuate" are two words frequently confused by native speakers (in this context, you could have meant either, and I assume you meant "perpetuate").

Post by DanBC » Wed, Jan 04, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #130

DanBC wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a million YouTube videos of people confidently telling you how to do something but getting it pretty badly wrong. There are so many that there's now another genre of reacting to this bad advice.

I'm not sure how my comment was interpreted as "it's impossible to be wrong". I made a narrow claim that faking English knowledge in Brazil and Portugal is harder today than in the 19th century.

Post by kwhitefoot » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 11:10 AM UTC

akolbe wrote: post #77

kwhitefoot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shop in this context does not mean a place where you buy things, it most likely meant workshop originally but in this idiomatic phrase it just means place .

Which was kind of my point – DeepL knows that (sometimes). In the above case ("mud all over the shop"), it offers you "place" ("Ort") as an alternative translation for "shop". So it seems to have some inkling that an actual shop may not be what is meant. This means it's up to the user to decide which it is, which to me seems fair enough. (In other sentences using this idiom, however, DeepL does fail miserably. If you…

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jan 07, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #146

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "all over the shop" is an adverbial expression meaning someone/something was haphazard, lacking in control, or behaving unusually. "Messi [a footballer] was all over the shop" might be said if he was regularly out of position in match, or performed uncharacteristically unskillfully. The verb is implied here. If you say "mud was all over the shop" then the only interpretation I know is that a literal shop has mud…

> What's your interpretation of the full expression "there's mud all over the shop"? Unless the conversation already included references to a building where one buys things it would just mean "there's mud all over the place".