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Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
Aha! So people who say "boni" are pretentious boneheads, correct?
Or under-informed. I'm going to go with the assumption that everybody who I see use "boni" just saw somebody else do it and thought that it was correct. It's all the fault of one literati wanna-be. Hopefully my clarification will help make otherwise perfectly literate people stop using wrong words.
To, too, and two. There, their, and they're. Please learn these. Quick format text is killing the ability to use the English language properly.
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I have a problem with there, their and they're. Sometimes I can blame it on the quick formatting, sometimes it's my own fault. I find it painfully ironic when people make a mistake out of a desire to sound superior though.
Iregardless. That one kills me.
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Haha! Iregardless! Grimmy, you're awesome. Knowing that you have a problem with a set of homonyms puts you one very important step beyond those who don't.
They're is the easy one. It's a contraction so you know that it's short for "they are."
There is "over there."
Their is "it belongs to them, so it is their thing."
A mnemonic device for there and their could be "I" don't own that, so it's "theirs." (Since there is an "I" in "their")
EDIT: I realized that I used "homonyms" to describe homophones. Bad! Bad Abyssian!
Why can't they be people who are just having fun with the language? What's wrong with playing with words? I use "octopi" as a plural for "octopus" (when the situation arises) even though I know it's technically incorrect. Why not "boni"? Or "malus" instead of "penalty"?
OK, that last one might be too different; if people can't understand what you mean, that's a reason not to use it. But do you require that people use the correct plural "phalanges" for "phalanx"? Or is that only for bones?
Why can't "regardless" and "irregardless" mean the same thing? After all, "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.
I can get pet-peeved when people are using words incorrectly. But if they're just having fun, why the grief over it?
Usually, they're not doing it 'to have fun'. They just don't know better.
'Having fun' is no excuse for ignorance.
I don't mind "Octopi" because "Octopus" actually means, well, "Octopus." My problem with "boni," to answer your last question, is that I don't actually believe that most users of "boni" are using it for fun; I think they are using it because they believe that it is correct.
If a user is playing with the silly rules of a hodge-podge language than power to them. I actually encourage fun with intellectual pursuits (but don't watch "Big Bang Theory"), provided that those having fun demonstrate their expertise. It's like abstract art; anyone can throw paint on a canvas, it takes a lot more to throw paint on a canvas and have it actually say something.
At this point we edge precariously into the 'sanctity' of the English language vs. the 'vitality' of the English language debate & I will merely add that there are sub-sets of same that require very precise terminology in order to accurately convey information, and mis-communication may be one of the great banes of modern civilization.
Don't even get me started on the whole 'theory vs premise' thing or I will yell at you repeatedly & call you bad names in my mind.
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Isn't Boni the lead singer of U2?
The difference between flammable and inflammable is the temperature at which the substance burns.
Abyssian: your next task, should you choose to accept it, is to rid the world of people who use the words 'ironic' and 'literally' incorrectly.
(Good luck with that one.)
Ooh, I'm not sure I can stop that. However, I open this thread (officially!) to anyone who would like to point out common problems with the use of the English language. This includes, but is not limited to: grammar, spelling, vocabulary/definition, and punctuation. Please be specific and please offer an alternative that is correct along with an explanation of the rules in question.
This could last a while. It's too bad I have to go to work, now, because I would really like to see how this goes. Ah, well. I guess I'll get to read a whole day's worth of poor English at the end of the day. Have fun.
EDIT: It should be noted that discussion about poor use of language is not Paizo or even game-related. Please try to address grievances that apply to gamers wherever possible. Thank you.
Isn't Boni the lead singer of U2?
Only if you clone him :P
Abyssian: your next task, should you choose to accept it, is to rid the world of people who use the words 'ironic' and 'literally' incorrectly.
(Good luck with that one.)
Wouldn't it be ironic? To spread false meaning of irony while fighting for purity of meaning?
This isn't RPG related, but any discussion on the mis-use of the word literally needs a nod in the direction of English football pundit (Association Football, that is) Jamie Redknapp.
He is legendary over here for his continual misunderstanding of the word. Some of his best are collected here:
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Mine 2 cents,
Althoug i`m against grammar assassination, or making up words, it`s a fact that english language cames up with corruptions of many other languages,c like latin, french and old dialects.
Shrine came from the french "Cher Reine" (Dear Queen)
Silly came from Celt "Seelie"
Berou came unchanged from french
and many many more examples.
What i`m trying to say is that language is an living thing, always changeing and changing again.
But boni for plural bonus sucks a lot.
At this point we edge precariously into the 'sanctity' of the English language vs. the 'vitality' of the English language debate & I will merely add that there are sub-sets of same that require very precise terminology in order to accurately convey information, and mis-communication may be one of the great banes of modern civilization.
Don't even get me started on the whole 'theory vs premise' thing or I will yell at you repeatedly & call you bad names in my mind.
While I support this sentiment, I personally draw the line at clarity.
Regressing to (perceived) Latin grammar does nothing to help with the clarity of statements. It strikes me as a little bit arrogant, and that's coming from me. ;)
The rulebooks say "bonuses", so you'll make yourself better understood by doing the same.
People often confuse the words "it's" and "its" but I've got a system that I think makes it easy to remember which is which.
"It's," is the contraction for "it is."
"Its" is a possessive pronoun showing ownership of something by "it."
The simple way to remember which one is which one that I use is this:
Possessive pronouns never have an apostrophe.
his
hers
theirs
yours
ours
its
I think once you know that, knowing which one to use is easy. You just have to remember that possessive pronouns never have an apostrophe.
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"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." ~ James D. Nicoll
Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
Continuing on this line of thought, is it Magi or Maguses? I guess it would depend on what part of Golarion the Magus first appeared to determine the correct plural form. Does anyone know?
Wouldn't it be ironic? To spread false meaning of irony while fighting for purity of meaning?Abyssian: your next task, should you choose to accept it, is to rid the world of people who use the words 'ironic' and 'literally' incorrectly.
(Good luck with that one.)
Is that what I did!?
I have to look up ironic now.
Continuing on this line of thought, is it Magi or Maguses? I guess it would depend on what part of Golarion the Magus first appeared to determine the correct plural form. Does anyone know?Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
Okay, I had to come back to this from work.
In the PRD, Paizo consistently uses "magi."
Duel vs Dual. Grrrrrr...
As a scientist in the field of statistical machine learning, I'd really prefer if language stopped evolving and stuck to some consistent form.
Natural language is hard enough for robots already!
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I guess historically Magi were followers of Zoroaster who could prophecy by observing the stars.
Wouldn't it be ironic? To spread false meaning of irony while fighting for purity of meaning?Is that what I did!?
Nope. I was teasing Abyssian about ridding the world of people who use the words "ironic" incorrectly.
I have to look up ironic now.
It never hurts. I do it a few times a year...
They're is the easy one. It's a contraction so you know that it's short for "they are."
There is "over there."
Their is "it belongs to them, so it is their thing."
I've known all of that since grade school. It's my fingers that won't catch on!
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." ~ James D. Nicoll
So true. I find it interesting the variety of plural endings that can be found in the English language mainly due to the series of Viking invasions that plagued Britain many centuries ago. My favourite plural ending which is quite rare is "en" or "ren". Two examples are "children" and "oxen". I bet you can't think of any others. :)
Two examples are "children" and "oxen". I bet you can't think of any others. :)
Brethren?
Why can't "regardless" and "irregardless" mean the same thing? After all, "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.I can get pet-peeved when people are using words incorrectly. But if they're just having fun, why the grief over it?
Inflammable is a different case, being that inflame means what it does. If you could irregard something and it meant the same as to regard something then irregardless would be a perfectly good synonym for regardless.
I find that no one ever uses irregardless when they agree with you. It's normally only uttered in an effort to sound more intelligent during a debate. Gotta get that extra syllable in when you're tallying up the big words. It's like they think they're playing boggle.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." ~ James D. NicollSo true. I find it interesting the variety of plural endings that can be found in the English language mainly due to the series of Viking invasions that plagued Britain many centuries ago. My favourite plural ending which is quite rare is "en" or "ren". Two examples are "children" and "oxen". I bet you can't think of any others. :)
I'll go for 'brethren'. It is rare though, isn't it? I hadn't noticed that before.
EDIT: NInja'd (or should it really be ninjed?) by a full three minutes and I only wrote three short sentences. How'd that happen?
Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
Not sure why some words are customarily partially declined and others aren't. At this point "data," the nominative/accusative plural of the 2nd declension neuter "datum," isn't going away. "Datums" is not entering the English language.
I recall hearing that the fat cats in charge of American English are trying to drop using '-i' for plural '-uses.' I'm all for that. To me '-i' sounds like some weird pig latin.
Maybe someone could confirm or refute it? *shrug*
PS. irregardless vs. regardless is always fun.
Not sure why some words are customarily partially declined and others aren't. At this point "data," the nominative/accusative plural of the 2nd declension neuter "datum," isn't going away. "Datums" is not entering the English language.Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
I agree totally with "data" as a plural noun. My issue with "boni," specifically is that bonus doesn't mean the same thing in Latin and English and, therefore, shouldn't be used interchangeably (well, I don't think it should). Another fun fact with plurals from Italy: graffito is singular (even in English) and graffiti is plural.
I agree totally with "data" as a plural noun. My issue with "boni," specifically is that bonus doesn't mean the same thing in Latin and English and, therefore, shouldn't be used interchangeably (well, I don't think it should). Another fun fact with plurals from Italy: graffito is singular (even in English) and graffiti is plural.Not sure why some words are customarily partially declined and others aren't. At this point "data," the nominative/accusative plural of the 2nd declension neuter "datum," isn't going away. "Datums" is not entering the English language.Bonus means "good" in Latin. The English word "bonus" is only derived from said Latin word. The plural is, therefore, "bonuses." "Boni" is a Latin adjective describing plural, masculine nouns.
Just thought everyone should know.
I see your point, though Latin adjectives are often used as substantives.
"Boni laborant" is understood to mean "The good (men/people) work(s)."
Haha! Iregardless! Grimmy, you're awesome. Knowing that you have a problem with a set of homonyms puts you one very important step beyond those who don't.
They're is the easy one. It's a contraction so you know that it's short for "they are."
There is "over there."
Their is "it belongs to them, so it is their thing."
A mnemonic device for there and their could be "I" don't own that, so it's "theirs." (Since there is an "I" in "their")
EDIT: I realized that I used "homonyms" to describe homophones. Bad! Bad Abyssian!
Easier still for there and their, just remove the t. That leaves you with "here", which is a location, and "heir" which implies possession, just like their respective words.
Easier still for there and their, just remove the t. That leaves you with "here", which is a location, and "heir" which implies possession, just like their respective words.
Hey! What's the big idea having a better mnemonic device than me? Whenever I make them up for myself, they are always short sentences. For whatever reason, that's what I can both invent and remember.
I see your point, though Latin adjectives are often used as substantives.
I would personally like to see this as a normal convention in English. It works in Latin and Cantonese (at least; I'm sure it's perfectly normal in quite a few other languages, too) so why couldn't it work for English?
I guess we just haven't got the goods.
[Nero Wolfe]
"Contact" is NOT a verb!
[/Nero Wolfe]
Yeah, I've given up on that one.
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I actually recently discovered something that makes a lot of sense. When a word becomes part of a language, it adopts that language's pluralizations, etc.
For example, the plural of Octopus in English is Octopuses. The same goes for Cactus, Platypus, and any other words ending in "-us". The great thing about the English language is that we are free to change things so that they sound more acceptable. Heck, look at French. Some words don't even use half the letters in them. >_>
If you wanted to use the plural associated with a word's roots, you would have to discover the language of the word and learn to conjugate it based off of the conventions of the language. For example, Octopus comes from Greek, so the plural would be Octopedes. Octopi, however, is the Latin plural of a Greek word used in the English language. :P
And, despite all of this, I've adopted the plural for Platypus: Platypedes. It's so wrong, it almost hurts, but it's funny, too :P.
I see your point, though Latin adjectives are often used as substantives.I would personally like to see this as a normal convention in English. It works in Latin and Cantonese (at least; I'm sure it's perfectly normal in quite a few other languages, too) so why couldn't it work for English?
English I find is in many ways much less economical than other languages. It seems to me that this pattern is most common in gnomic utterances (e.g., 'The good die young,' 'the rich get richer,' 'the poor you have always with you.').
Reminds me of Cantonese/English pidgin. "Long-time, no-see," for instance.
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"You understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."
-The Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
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Pffft, English. Easymode language for the unwashed masses. Try ours, we'll make you cry and grind your teeth until your gums bleed. But in the end, if you'll be able to say one proper sentence in Polish, you will feel like you were made of victory and win.
Hehe. If you think English is easy, you should see German :P
I really liked German. Granted, I was in a town that hosted a U.S. Army base and most of the locals spoke English (so I always had a safety net!), but I felt like the language really was logical and made sense. This is also how I felt taking Latin in High School. I really like language that is almost mathematical in it's precision.
As for Polish, I have always kind of assumed that it had the same roots as German. This is strictly from assumption, as I never got a chance to visit Poland and never found a reason to explore the language. I suppose, thinking about it again, that Polish and Russian could very well be more closely related, but again, no practical or scholastic experience to back it up.
Pffft, English. Easymode language for the unwashed masses. Try ours, we'll make you cry and grind your teeth until your gums bleed. But in the end, if you'll be able to say one proper sentence in Polish, you will feel like you were made of victory and win.
One evening. Lots of alcohol. It always works.
Hehe. If you think English is easy, you should see German :P
I learned both languages. German pronounciation is a win for Poles, because they are the only sane people west of us who actually read letters instead of making sounds that have little to do with written down letters and they use the same reading for the same combination of letters every time. Ordnung must sein!
While grammar is logical and clear I never managed to grasp it enough to be capable of applying it during actual speaking and memorizing words was much harder than in case of English. It might be just the matter than I started to learn English earlier. Or maybe just my family German-speaking member limit was used up by my German cousins.As for Polish, I have always kind of assumed that it had the same roots as German. This is strictly from assumption, as I never got a chance to visit Poland and never found a reason to explore the language. I suppose, thinking about it again, that Polish and Russian could very well be more closely related, but again, no practical or scholastic experience to back it up.
Oh, and we have polar bears too! ;)
With Germans we share the way of pronouncing most (but not all) letters. With Russians we share the language group (Slavic). There are words borrowed from both languages. Technically, the closest languages would be Czech and Slovakian (West Slavic languages like Polish).
With Germans we share the way of pronouncing most (but not all) letters.
I think the Latin (rather than Cyrillic) letters is the basis for my assumption that Polish would be more German than Russian. The -ski/-sky suffixes probably should have tipped me off with regards to the similarity of language.
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"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." ~ James D. NicollSo true. I find it interesting the variety of plural endings that can be found in the English language mainly due to the series of Viking invasions that plagued Britain many centuries ago. My favourite plural ending which is quite rare is "en" or "ren". Two examples are "children" and "oxen". I bet you can't think of any others. :)
I did think men and women were of this form, but quick google seems to say no.
Boxen and Unixen for computer box and variant of unix respectively. Usually by people taking the pi**, but using this same rule none the less.
I personally like index - indices, matrix - matrices.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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[Nero Wolfe]
"Contact" is NOT a verb!
[/Nero Wolfe]Yeah, I've given up on that one.
Nor is "impact," except in some technical vocabularies.
Turds like "impactful" or "healthful" really make my head asplode.
"I'd rather decline ten German beers than one German adjective."
--Mark Twain
Grammatically, English is an extremely simple language compared with most other Indo-European languages
What makes English so challenging to both native and nonnative speakers alike are:
--Irregular spelling
--Extremely large lexicon
I might add the aforementioned irregular pluralization.
Part of the reason for the variance is that English is extremely friendly both to borrowing words from other languages, and to neologisms.
Englishis part of the Germanic language family, and the basic grammatical structure shows that; however it split from the other modern Germanic languages earliest-- most likely due to the geographic isolation of Britain from the European continent. After the Norman conquest in the mid-11th century, French became the court and legal language, and many French-derived words entered the vernacular. Later, during the Renaissance, a resurgence of Latin scholarship brought in more words of direct Latin derivation-- many were directly borrowed from the esteemed language of the Ancients, while others were newly constructed Latinate words. This process continued during the reign of Latin as the primary language of scholarship.
A rough estimate is that about 30% of the English lexicon derives each from Germanic, French, and Latin roots; and the remaining 10% isfrom other sources (other languages or neologisms).
Consequently, many (if not most) concepts have three roughly synonymous words with slightly different shades of meaning. Example: an adjective meaning "pertaining to the monarch" could be: "kingly" (Germanic), "royal" (French), or "regal" (Latin).
[And, to Abyssanian: Both Polish and Russian are in the Balto-Slavic language family.]