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Still British, though. All you contributed to the series was Captain Jack Bloody Harkness. I hope you're proud.We have the Doctor. We win. ;-)Ooo! British hate :)Not I. I love BBC America. :)Damn!
of course the best Doctor in a dogs age was Scottish.
Tell that to a Scotsman and uh make sure your ADD insurance is paid up first.
I like John Barrowman, not when he is kissing another man, but he is not a half bad actor.
Director of Game Development
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I don't the mind the occassional mistake at all.
I try to avoid mistakes when I post only because, since I teach English Literature, I feel I can't make a mistake without people I know bugging me about it.
The posts that bug me are the ones that are so full of mistakes that, even if I can figure out what the poster is trying to say, I'm so annoyed at the errors that I don't care what the uneducated fool has to say.
In everyday usage, the only thing that bothers me is people who think they're using good grammar even when it's wrong. Or, the thing that really ticks me off, those who corect others even if they haven't made a mistake.
I truly agree.
I think different kinds of grammar have their places. I really in no way would expect someone to be 100% correct on a messageboard, chatroom, text message or any casual conversation. I tend to type posts like I talk. I use heaps of "gonna"s, "kinda"s, and certainly overuse (and just plain make up) contractions. I think it's always been my way of trying to really jam a sense of tone into my words.
I really don't fault anyone for occasional errors unless I'm just having fun with them (and I hope every time I've done it, the victim was aware I was playing).
Tell that to a Scotsman and uh make sure your ADD insurance is paid up first....of course the best Doctor in a dogs age was Scottish.Still British, though...
Craig Ferguson may be an American citizen now, but he'd have a few choice words for you about that, Cap'n.
The title of this thread still makes me twitch.
I'm sure you'll think of a special "reward" for Mikaze/Mizuke. :)
Oh yeah, almost forgot. Confusion of "rein" and "reign" is rampant. Royalty holds the reins of power, though, and reins do help you reign over your mount. It's an oddly pleasing misuse.
Decimate means 10% killed/destroyed, not the majority.
I hate pro-active too; active worked just fine, and still does.
Many of the previously identified errors sometimes irritate me as well, but one thing that must be understood is that English is an evolving language - indeed it is possibly the most dynamic language on Earth. Change will occur; actual errors should be decried and corrected but changes aren't automatically errors. As far as the use or lack of 'u' goes, being a Canadian I agree with the British folks in this thread. Actually, if go back in time and apply standards to English, a great many changes that are now considered correct would never have entered use. One further point is that English, in addition to being dynamic, also borrows (steals, less charitably) from any language it encounters. Father, brother, mother, sister are all derived, ultimately, from Sanskrit, while there are numerous (not countless, but numerous) terms from French, Latin, Greek, German, various North American First Nations, various groups of Australian Aboriginees, Hindi, and many other languages besides. I tend to be a bit annoyed with myself if I go back and notice an error in one of my earlier posts, but fortunately those are uncommon.
Many of the previously identified errors sometimes irritate me as well, but one thing that must be understood is that English is an evolving language - indeed it is possibly the most dynamic language on Earth. Change will occur; actual errors should be decried and corrected but changes aren't automatically errors.
Booo! My American English doesn't need to change! Get off my dictionary, you whippersnapper!
Some examples of changes in English:
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Hey, Tom.
Sometimes change in a language is good and useful. It's very easy in English to coin new words, for example, and the English vocabulary is so vast --triple the number of words of the nearest non-agglutinative rival-- and our syntax rules so hard-wired that it's a simple matter for people to use those new words. The ability to "verb any word", which allows us to say "I emailed my students to stop texting in class," comes from that rigid syntax.
But sometimes change is not so useful. Let's use imply and infer as an example. If I hint at something, and you pick up on the clue, I'm implying, and you're inferring. That's a useful bit of vocabulary. But some people are ill-educated enough to confuse the two words, for them, infer means the same as imply. And the people that the American Heritage dictionary chose to sample included enough of these confused people that the editors reported, faithfully, that those two words were now synonymous.
That does a disservice to the language. If infer no longer has a distinct meaning, then it's bulkier and less elegant to talk about people who are quick to pick up on unstated premises.
The shift in the word gay is useful. There are a surfeit of words synonyms for happy, but we needed a good one for homosexual. Likewise the shift in quantum from "money to pay a bill" to "a discrete and indivisible amount".
I don't mourn the death of the clumsy plurals kine and shoon.
But confusing of for have is illiterate drivel. (Seriously; I'm convinced it stems from a lack of reading actual sentences.) One of Steven's citations suggest that typical people get sloppy, and can no longer distinguish among metal, meddle, mettle, and medal. That's not a distinction I'm ready to concede.
(Note that these idjit words don't necessarily stand up to time. Apparently it was trendy in the late 19th Century to spell codicil as "coddle-shell", which sensible people of the day decried to wholesome effect.)
When Shakespeare wrote, there was no dictionary for English. (Other languages had dictionaries; Spanish had its first in 1492.) His spelling, word choice, and even the great number of words he was the first to use in print, came from his learned background and unmatched gifts for language.
If a young woman comes along with that level of passion and skill in English, and grows the language with articulate neologisms that fill needs and catch on, I'm all with that. If gaming terms become popular enough to extend as metaphors into standard conversation, that a healthy kind of change.
But let's not ensconce lazy and ill-educated use as canon, under the aegis of "language changes". THXBYE
One of Steven's citations suggest that typical people get sloppy, and can no longer distinguish among metal, meddle, mettle, and medal. That's not a distinction I'm ready to concede.
This is from The Indie Review (callouts and bolding added by me):
"So, how’d they pull this off you might be wondering? I wondered the same thing. After reading the story on their website www.sigmundblue.com and talking with the three of them, I found out just how pain staking [sic] the nearly 18 month process was. One member would come up with a riff our melody and shoot it to the other two via an online storage site. The other two would then add their ideas to it and send it back around in a cycle until the song was complete. As if it’s not amazing enough that they were able to accomplish an entire album in that manor [sic], Long Distance Mixtape is, in my opinion, one of the best indy albums to hit the scene in a long long time."
I also notice that the New York Times has abandoned any pretense of being able to distinguish "its" from "it's" (although they haven't stooped to that repulsive waffle of ignorance, "its'").
I'll go one worse; my wife and I are both college instructors, and we get papers from college students written in textspeak all the time!My eyes hurt looking at this thread title.
My pet peeve isn't really about grammar, it's that f!~*ing textspeak. How much damn good does it do to turn an entire sentence into an acronym? I spend a good 5-10x longer trying to figure that s@#! out than it would have taken me to read the unabbreviated message.
I can't beleive students don't know the difference between writing when you are talking to your friends, and when you are writing to someone in a professional environment. I would not have even tried that in H.S., silly kids.
My three biggest peeves are not other peoples' mistakes, but rather my own.
For some reason when I type, I always do this;
borign
throwign
wign
happenign
I have to correct it constantly.
I also cannot remember the difference between were and where.
Last but not least is a side-effect of working for Apple.
iNdividual
iMaginary
iLogical
You can see where (<CURSES) I'm going with this.
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Hey, Tom.
...lecture...
I make no excuses and take up no banners for incorrect usages. However, witty verse that makes use of such misappropriation to a specific end - that has value. How much less significance would we infer from As You Like It without words like "feign" and "fain." Would we truly be convinced that Inigo thought his revenge through fully if he never questioned Vizzini's use of "inconceivable?"
I can see how, from the brevity of my post, you might have thought I was implying such disregard for language as found in the AH dictionary is anything but a pox.
(Though, if one were so inclined, one might argue that Robert Browning's 'Pippa Passes' would have faded into obscurity if it weren't for his mistake, but that may be more a cautionary tale than support for an argument.)
Also: squeeeeeeeee!!!!111Moar Mortika lectures! Seriously, I learn something every time. I can't wait to go for a walk in my new shoon.
canon/cannon
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None of them really bother me except over use of chat speak. Since I can't read a lot of it, except the very common ones. The reason that other stuff doesn't bother me is two fold. One I make more than my far share of grammar errors and two I know more than a few posters here, that English is not their first language. Since I imagine they speak/read/write English far better than I can theirs, who am I can criticize?
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Basic typos annoy me. I can understand it if I made a mistake. Been years since I was in school. I use way to many commas, why, because I put them where I pause at; not just where one would expect it. But mistyping a word I know how to spell, just annoys me to no end. spelling teh instead of the, and such. Who ever put the basic spell checker in Chrome is m new best friend.
Who ever put the basic spell checker in Chrome is m new best friend.
*snicker snicker snicker*
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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I can't wait to go for a walk in my new shoon.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of three words in the current lexicon which form plurals by adding an -en to the end: child, brother, and ox.
Moreover, "clouting thy shoon" is an Elizabethan idiomatic expression meaning "tying your shoes."
"I saw the man in the moon, fie man, fie.
I saw the man in the moon who's the fool now?
I saw the man in the moon, clouting of St. Peter's shoon.
Thou hast well-drunken, man, who's the fool now?
I don't know if these have been posted yet, but I have a few.
'Disrespect' used as a verb. You can show disrespect, you can be disrespectful, but you cannot disrespect anything. It is not a verb!
I have heard newscasters use this term, and I do not mean as a quote of some other idiot. No, the idiocy is theirs.
Split infinitives. Thank you, Bill Shatner. '...to boldly go...' Bite me, space boy, it's '...to go boldly...' Nothing gets between the 'to' and the verb in an infinitive.
The appending of the suffix '-ery' in the restaurant business. 'Bakery' is fine, but there are no such words as 'carvery,' 'eatery,' or 'steakery'.
The suffix '-age' to make a word sound more important. 'Signage,' for example. What's wrong with 'signs'? 'Coinage' for 'coins'. The US Army even uses the term 'tentage'. It sounds more impressive than 'tents', I guess. Shall we now refer to basketball as 'hoopage', hockey as 'puckage', etc., ad nauseum?
A trend that I blame the Food Network for: the word 'reduction' as applied to making a liquid-based condiment. We used to call it 'sauce' or 'gravy'. Now, in order to sound properly pretentious, the meat popscicles on Food Network use that other term.
'Disrespect' used as a verb. You can show disrespect, you can be disrespectful, but you cannot disrespect anything. It is not a verb!
All right, when I referenced dictionary.reference.com, Chris Mortika and Treppa SHOWED DISRESPECT for it. Would you consider Merriam-Webster's online dictionary to be more authoritative? Here is "disrespect" as a transitive verb.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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Hey there, M! After defending good language use, I feel waffley this morning, 'cause you sound like you got up on the cranky side of the bed.
'Disrespect' used as a verb. You can show disrespect, you can be disrespectful, but you cannot disrespect anything. It is not a verb!
I'll disagree. One of the most powerful attributes of the English language is our rigid syntax. (I compare it to German, French, and Latin, three languages I know, and with Finnish, Old Norse, and Japanese, through friends who are better at languages than I.) Our rules are what allow us to stick foreign words into our sentences and have them make sense.
Disrespect as a verb is a recent coining, you're right. But I think it's a useful one, because disrespect (v.t.) carries its weight. The particulars of its syntax are borrowed fro the verb respect. What other verb would you propose in its place?
Split infinitives. Thank you, Bill Shatner. '...to boldly go...' Bite me, space boy, it's '...to go boldly...' Nothing gets between the 'to' and the verb in an infinitive.
Sorry. Infinitives can't be split in Latin, because they're a verb form. Shakespeare was happy to artfully arrange words inside infinitives, as I've done with this sentence. John Donne loved them. So did Ben Franklin, Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln.
The appending of the suffix '-ery' in the restaurant business. 'Bakery' is fine, but there are no such words as 'carvery,' 'eatery,' or 'steakery'.
The suffix '-age' to make a word sound more important.
A trend that I blame the Food Network for: the word 'reduction' as applied to making a liquid-based condiment. We used to call it 'sauce' or 'gravy'. Now, in order to sound properly pretentious, the meat popscicles on Food Network use that other term.
Reduction and the verb reduce have been standard terms in cookbooks since I learned to cook, 35 years ago. It's no more pretentious than gamers using fortitutde. It's the correct terminology.
(Okay; Vampire and Mage players using those games' correct terminology can be pretentious. Granted.)
The suffix -age isn't a question of sounding important. It's one of the basic English suffixes for talking about an attribute of an object, independent of its accidents. The suffix can be overused, or used poorly, but it seems ironic to decry the usage of -age.
I'll give you the complaint about -ery. That's just kind of dumb. I hope my FLGS never becomes my Friendly Local Gamery.
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Also, "reduction" is not the same thing as a sauce or gravy. As I've been learning to cook, I've discovered that all of these words that I figured were synonyms are, in fact, not. A reduction is a liquid that has been boiled down in order to thicken it or intensify its flavor. Gravy is most often prepared by combining a reduction of meat juice with flour or another starch. Sauce, of course, is a generic term for any number of liquids meant to be served over or with another type of food.
Thank you! CH is the new Paizo Iron Chef. (P.S. Any avid reader of Robert B. Parker knows that distinction as well, because Spenser spends as much time cooking as he does shooting the bad guys.)
Hopefully no one starts a thread now saying "stop criticizing my cooking vocab errors!"
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Who ever put the basic spell checker in Chrome is m new best friend.*snicker snicker snicker*
Well he said spell checker, not grammar checker. ;-)
weird thing is I spell a lot of things British.
(ooooh, and 'alot'. I had a teacher who had a sign in his classroom. "Alot is a small animal that lives in Austrilia.")
Split infinitives. Thank you, Bill Shatner. '...to boldly go...' Bite me, space boy, it's '...to go boldly...' Nothing gets between the 'to' and the verb in an infinitive.Sorry. Infinitives can't be split in Latin, because they're a verb form. Shakespeare was happy to artfully arrange words inside infinitives, as I've done with this sentence.
I am forced to completely agree. This one is from the school of linguistic enforcement that wants English to behave like Latin. It's like ending a sentence with a preposition, which is something I'm allowed to harmlessly do if I want to. It's a perfectly cromulent usage.
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I consider ending a sentence in a preposition to be a question of whether the writing is formal or informal. It's so pervasive in conversational English that it seems silly to weed it out of all written communication. However, it can sometimes lead to confusion where the function of the preposition is unclear, so I like to stick with the old rule whenever I'm writing anything formal, academic, or professional.
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Many of my peeves have been covered, but nobody mentioned nauseated/nauseous and fearsome/fearful yet. They're right up there with loose/lose and lay/lie. Threads with the word 'viable' in the title also irritate me, but that's neither grammar nor spelling.
And there's a special place in my heart for "nipped in the butt."
Well my pet peeve being a Brit is the use of the word "healthful" to mean "healthy". I, mean be consistent, does one say somebody's wealthful when they are wealthy?
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Color Spray is spelt Colour Spray people!No, it's not. :-)
I think he's trying to wind you up ;) Colour Spray would be the UK English rendering, but as the spell was invented in America, I'm quite happy to use Color Spray personally.
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Do you have a problem with this, poodle? The fact that Americans have debased our language by dropping many unnecessary letters is nothing short of an outrage! I have a good mind to write a stern letter to the Times about it, you see if I don't.I didn't. I grew up in Britain :)God save the queen, and give her more of your taxes too. :)
Oh but for the hubris of Noah Webster!! You write to the Times and I'll write a letter to auntie Lizzie.
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Do you have a problem with this, poodle? The fact that Americans have debased our language by dropping many unnecessary letters is nothing short of an outrage!Funny you did not mention it when we bailed you out of WWII. Was it just because you were still sore over 1776 or 1812?Of course not. We were merely offended at your slovenlynous in taking three years to realise there was a war on.
And if it wasn't for those unseemly French we might still have a colony.
Demn them ;)
I agree that, in SPOKEN English, it's often necessary to end a sentence with a preposition. When we speak, we don't always know ahead of time what exact words we'll use. We don't know which preposition we'll need, or even whether we'll need a preposition at all. Only by mentally rehearsing our every sentence before speaking it could we know that. And for consistency, I think that dangling prepositions should be allowed in WRITTEN English as well.
Then again, consistency isn't always possible...
Well my pet peeve being a Brit is the use of the word "healthful" to mean "healthy". I, mean be consistent, does one say somebody's wealthful when they are wealthy?
I might point out that English is often inconsistent. Teachers teach. They often taught. Preachers preach, but never praught. Something beautiful has beauty.
And if it wasn't for those unseemly French we might still have a colony.
Demn them ;)
Yeah, if it wasn't for the French, we Americans would all be speaking British now.
And if it weren't for U.S. involvement in World War II, the French would all be speaking German.
My biggest problem with Typos are Grammer are Spelling and Grammer Nazi's geez... some of us are not anal retentive and are content to let the jist of the text overshadowing something simple like grammer or spelling, as long as I can tell what it means I don't sweat it, or bash anyone for it...so that said... if you are a stickler for these things...TEACH ENGLISH... don't flame people on message boards or in chatrooms...
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My biggest problem with Typos are Grammer are Spelling and Grammer Nazi's geez...
"Grammar" doesn't have an "e".
I have a hard time with "good enough". I don't care on message boards as much as on business emails. But far too many people seem to strive for C- communication.
Right now my biggest pet peeve is "than" and "then". These are two very different words that mean two very different things. They even sound differently (assuming that you are pronouncing them correctly). "Than" is used for comparison. "Then" is used for a sequence of events or time. Yet people don't seem to know the difference.
geez... some of us are not anal retentive and are content to let the jist of the text overshadowing something simple like grammer or spelling, as long as I can tell what it means I don't sweat it, or bash anyone for it...so that said... if you are a stickler for these things...TEACH ENGLISH... don't flame people on message boards or in chatrooms...
A lot of times, right or wrong, there is an automatic assumtion that a person who doesn't put at least a token effort towards spelling and grammar probably doesn't put a lot of effort into reading other posts in the thread, or thinking about what they're writing.