Forum Moderators: open
"Unfriend" has been named the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, chosen from a list of finalists with a tech-savvy bent. Unfriend was defined as a verb that means to remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook."It has both currency and potential longevity," said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's U.S. dictionary program, in a statement.
"In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year."
In technology, there was "hashtag," which is the hash sign added to a word or phrase that lets Twitter users search for tweets similarly tagged; "intexticated" for when people are distracted by texting while driving, and "sexting," which is the sending of sexually explicit SMSes and pictures by cellphone.
I understood what you meant ..but a non English mother tongue speaker might not have done .. and the use of "like" is similar ( a better word) a verbal tic ..similar to "you know" or the modern English form "yuhnuh" as used by Claire Fox "akchoolly" "evry" second or third word ..
Precise doesn't mean shorter .
you may be confusing it with Concise ..which can mean shorter or smaller ..
I suspect that the difference in the way people approach grammar and vocabulary has much to do with their ages ..I have no doubt that I'm at least 20 years older than you ..
But a tip ..For those of us who were educated to use correct grammar and to use vocabulary as opposed to adding "like" before the word we wish to use ..Landing on web pages that have bad grammar and poor vocabulary makes us hit the back button faster than flash or anigifs ..
No matter what the content ..if it is badly written ..we are gone without ever reading and maybe clicking your adsense ..or buying your product or service ..
So unless your market is exclusively the under 25s ..( and even then ..don't take it as an attack ..it wasn't meant to be :) it was using your own post to show you how older people see writing and language .
If language is to be free to evolve ..then it should improve ..and not devolve ..and get worse ..otherwise it degenerates into dialect and builds verbal and written walls , which is not what good communication is about .
*Pauses allow the other person to get a word in :)
CSS? ...Oh wait Internet Explorer
Sorry couldn't resist that one :-)
Now it is devolving into a patois as more people become too lazy to use real words and substitute txt spk. This is presumably because they use it on their mobile phones and think that it is cool to use it in normal communications.
The flaw in this is that some of the abbreviations used are equivocal. e.g. lol is it "laughs out Loud" or "lots of love"?
In my opinion this has developed because teaching standards have dropped (successive governments of all colours are more to blame than teachers), and the rise of an "everything is easy" culture that accepts dire "talent" shows like X factor where the talentless can become celebrities, so called "reality TV" programmes like big brother, and that rhythmic doggerel that pretends to be music (Rap). People are programmed to believe that everything should be done quickly and that anyone can do anything without the necessary knowledge, experience or talent. This is very apparent in the web design industry where everyone has a nephew that can build the site cheaper than you.
Sorry for the rant.
In conclusion; Standard English may take longer to type but at least everyone understands it.
That works until you hit your text character limit. :)
People are programmed to believe that everything should be done quickly and that anyone can do anything without the necessary knowledge, experience or talent. This is very apparent in the web design industry where everyone has a nephew that can build the site cheaper than you.
A+
Just ask the Académie française.
eelixduppy - if I had a dollar for every time my wife has absquatulated with my last cookie, I'd be rich by now.
I'd hate to be a teacher these days grading reports haha
I would love to be one. I have plenty of red pencils.
eelixduppy - if I had a dollar for every time my wife has absquatulated with my last cookie, I'd be rich by now.
Bet you looked it up! :)
I don't own a dictionary. I believe that common usage determines what is correct, so I find dictionaries a terrible obstacle to understanding the language.
Okay, I looked it up.
In any case, I prefer to follow Joyce Carrol Oates advice and use Germanic/Saxon words rather than French/Latin words anyway, as they have more earthy power, as in "friendship" versus "amity" and "earth" versus "terrain". Absquatulate has no place outside parody!
Now you've set me musing though... friend/unfriend, verb/noun/gerund, correct/incorrect. So...
I wonder if Shakespeare ever saw an English dictionary. He might have, but of course Chaucer certainly did not. Shakespeare died in 1616 and the first English dictionary appeared in 1604. In any case, Hamlet (1600-1601) was certainly written without the benefit of an English dictionary. Of course, none of that stopped Shakespeare from having the largest vocabulary of any author in English ever (over 20K words).
In the sixteenth century, really up until the Civil War in the case of England, which was rather behind the times in terms language and printing, people weren't fettered by such things as standard spellings.
For the first folio edition of Shakespeare, the compositors regularly changed spellings depending on which letters they were running out of and how much space they had on the page. A bit embarrassing when historians/bibliographers pointed that fact out to linguists/literature scholars who were studying Shakespeare's spelling!
I used to be somewhat in agreement with Leosghost, but after a career as a historian of the sixteenth century and editing numerous French manuscripts from the period (and from a region where people spoke Franco-provencal, not French), I think we are hamstrung by over zealous attention to "correct" usage.
I am much more of a descriptionist than proscriptionist now. I used to decry (see, I can use the franco-latin words too) people who used an adjective in place of an adverb, as in "he runs quick".
I eventually realized that I had completely misunderstood what was happening. It was not that people were using adjectives in place of adverbs (which is not actually possible, because syntax, not word form defines whether or not something is an adverb, at least from a descriptionist point of view).
Rather, adjectival and adverbial forms are merging over time and I expect that in the future they will have the same morphology in the vast majority of cases.
So in the same way that many English verb forms have merged, so to we are starting to use the same forms for adjectives and adverbs.
English has simple conjugations and is weakly inflected because it has simplified over time, in part to accommodate invasion and immigration.
This made it easier for people throughout England to understand each other much better (though when the Book of Common Prayer was translated from Latin to English, riot and rebellion broke out in part because people in some regions couldn't understand it anymore).
As a result of this process, English has a relatively simple syntax, but a very rich vocabulary (much richer than French by some whole number multiple - some say 5x).
I suppose this was going somewhere....
Oh yes. Leosghost - if people use a word as a verb, it is a verb. Simple as that.
PS - please don't tell me that you are one of those people who is outraged by split infinitives ;-)
I enjoyed a book by Bill Bryson on the English language, looking at various changes, also at grammatical "rules" that often aren't hard and fast.
So debates like the one here could have occurred at many times. Shakespeare invented a goodly number of words.
As I recall, Bryson wrote there was no real basis for not splitting infinitives - which pleases me, as I prefer "to boldly go" and so forth.
Yes, forming ellipsis from two periods, not three, looks quirky.
Clarity is indeed important, and this depends on audience. More "generic" English required for a web page aimed at international audience; abbrev all u wish in tweets 2 yr mates; and liberally use geekspeak on techy forums (oops - fora!).
Languages evolve
Agreed... and they are ultimately defined by how people use them. There is no authority on the rules of language outside of the actual users.
Which is why people will continue to "defriend". Because it just sounds right :-)
"Why did the Americans save such good old English words as skedaddle and chitterlings and chore, but not fortnight or heath? Why did they keep the irregular British pronunciations in words like colonel and hearth, but go down our own way in with lieutenant and schedule and clerk? Why in short is American English the way it is?"
You see it's all the fault of the Americans and I bet they also came up with "unfriend". :)
I haven't read Bryson's book, but in my own studies (which pertain to French-speaking areas, especially Switzerland) I'm fairly familiar with similar questions (some of my work is cited in the Glossaire des Patois de la Suisse Romande).
The thing that people often fail to realize is that not so long ago, languages were far, far less uniform. I mentioned how translating the Book of Common Prayer into "English" caused riots and major rebellion because the large number of people living in England didn't speak English. Not to mention that for much of British history, English wasn't even the native language of the monarch of course.
In my work, I often take documents from modern French-speaking areas and show them to native French speakers. If you take a document in the local language of Geneva, a French speaker of today from Geneva cannot understand even the simplest document. It's not a dialect of French at all, it's a dialect of Franco-provencal.
As recently as the French revolution, "French" was only the native language in 15 of 85 departements. After the crushing defeat by the Prussians in 1870-1871, the French decided to do the logical thing and blame the teachers. They conducted a survey and found that in large swaths of France, local instruction was not in French, but in the local language, which might be a dialect of French, but it might also be Provencal, Breton or some other language.
At that point, they started aggressive policies to get Frenchmen to speak French and to stamp out other languages. Yet when they instituted massive conscription in WWI, they found many Frenchman could not understand marching orders in French. Life in the trenches was a watershed event though, and those that survived went home realizing that their children were going to need to speak French in the modern world.
Even so, growing up in the 1930s, historian Mona Ozouf (who wrote the book on the educational reform after the Franco-Prussian war) was faced with a schizophrenic situation. She would be beaten by the teacher in school for speaking Breton and beaten by her father at home if she spoke French in the home. Her father was her teacher.
The point being that the uniformity of language within European countries as we know it today, reduced to a funny accent and a few regional terms, is actually quite a recent event.
So when you speak about "Americans" and "English", to some extent it's anachronistic. In the early seventeenth century when the first English came to the New World, they might well have been able to travel around their own country and found not only wildly different pronunciations, but different dialects and languages.
In most languages there's an important figure who becomes so dominant that his local dialect becomes "standard" and in northern Europe that usually began in the sixteenth century, earlier in Italy, as always.
In most German-speaking areas, that would be Luther, through his translation of the Bible, which gave the leg up to Saxon.
In Italy, Dante propelled Tuscan to the forefront of Italian dialects.
In England, I don't know. I would guess the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, but that's just guessing.
France is interesting. Calvin had a huge role, but unlike Luther and Dante, Calvin was a refugee who abandoned his home language (Picard) and mingled with refugees from all of France. He tried over successive editions of his great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, to shed words he had imported from Picard. So in that sense his is the only case where there was a conscious attempt to adopt and spread and more universal language rather than a local dialect.
In any case, that's why Dante, Luther and Calvin tend to appear more "modern" than their contemporaries. It's because of their subsequent influence.
So I don't know what Bryson says, but I suspect some of the explanation for words that Americans do and don't share with the British is a function of who came to America, from where and when (as well as the influence of other nations of course... do British say "Gesundheit" when someone sneezes ;-)
Should we all start speaking like we were in a Shakespearean play
You taught me language, and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! I unfriend thee foresooth!
(The Tempest)
So I don't know what Bryson says, but I suspect some of the explanation for words that Americans do and don't share with the British is a function of who came to America, from where and when (as well as the influence of other nations of course... do British say "Gesundheit" when someone sneezes ;-)
I totally agree (and we don't use Gesundheit in the UK - although I remember Walter Mathau using it in the original version of "The Taking of Pelham 123").
Even today there are still wide regional variations in the way English is used in the UK. Where I am in the west of Scotland the accent is unintelligible to lots of English people. Those of us who use the accent have to really moderate the way we speak to be understood outside our own backyards. The north east of Scotland is the same as are certain regions in Ireland and England.
The sad thing about this is that people using local accent or dialects are often looked down upon as being uneducated. This of course is not generally true. All they are doing is using the language they learned naturally as children. Actually those who can speak both ways could be said to be more knowledgeable than those who only speak "pure" English, whatever that is.
In the UK areas we also have our own dialect words and some of these get adopted into more nationwide usage particularly by the younger people. An example of this is the Scots word "mingin", which means bad, smelly or stinking. This is just the evolutionary nature of language and there is really nothing wrong with it. I don't think there is any such thing as a "pure" language and I doubt that there ever has been.
I would guess the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, but that's just guessing.
Every writer I can find of that period and before wrote English that is still perfectly comprehensible - even Chaucer is not all that difficult to understand.
as well as the influence of other nations of course... do British say "Gesundheit" when someone sneezes
I have never heard anyone say it.
Words with Latin and Greek roots do have the advantage of being very similar in other European languages. What is the French for homogeneous? That actually came up in conversation with a Frenchman who had to use the French word because he did not know the English word. It was not a problem!
I'm not thinking so much about comprehensibility, but how "modern" it feels. A quick measure would be to pick up a book and see how long you have to read before you feel "this is not recent". With Chaucer, you would only get a couple of words into it. I'm sure your wyff would agree ;-)
I remember in the 80's living in the midlands ( where the people have a string regional accent and many local dialects ..and hearing children and adults mimicking in their daily speech ..either grange hill ( set in a fictitious school in London ) ..or east enders ( set in a "mockney" fictitious district of London) ..now it has taken over as normal speech for most Brits under50 no matter where they are from ..as has not pronouncing the letter "T" if it is at the end of a word ..or saying "haitch" instead of "aitch" ..as in the official recorded message welcome to "haitch ess bee cee" ( HSBC) bank when called from outside the UK ..
It's as if everyone in France decided to adopt an accent of "le quartier nord du Marseille" ..large north African population ..strong accent mix of maghreb and bouche du rhone midi
Or as if everyone in the USA adults and children decided decided to adopt a fake brooklyn accent even if they were born in, bred in and had never left Wyoming ..
I have more trouble understanding claire fox and hazel bleers than I do in understanding Nelson Mandela ..that's because their accents and speech are fake and put on ..his isn't ..
I've likewise no problem splitting my sides and laughing till the tears flow at Billy Connolly ..perfectly understandable and hilarious since the day I first heard him in about 72 ..
But jonathon ross and brant leave me cold with their put on working class accents and obligatory nastiness and aggressivity ..real Londoners ..especially the comics ( I lived in crouch end, wood green , bounds green tooting and brixton during the mid70's ) dont put on the "mockney" and shout thinking that's what makes "funny".
That isn't language evolving or modernising ..that is language degrading to the lowest common denominator ..and losing it's variety and vocabulary at the same time
[edited by: Leosghost at 5:46 pm (utc) on Dec. 6, 2009]
now it has taken over as normal speech for most Brits under50 no matter where they are from
And head teachers in England who speak and mangle grammar in their interviews to the point where one wonders if they ever actually attended school themselves when they were younger ..One ( headmistress of a southern school with 1200 secondary pupils ) even used my least favourite fox/bleerism " sumthink" ( for something ) ..12 times in one short 3 minute interview ..
Ms fox once used "sumink" 23 times in under 3 minutes during the moral maze last year ..and "yuhnuh", ".akchooly".and "sekertree" as often as there are vowels in this sentence ..
My illusions are well and truly shattered.
I recall the days when presenters on TV and radio all spoke perfectly understandable standard English. The rise of the regional and foreign accents in broadcasting is driven by political correctness and does cause real problems in understanding. The BBC seems to be encouraging this to the point of lunacy, the West Indian guy who is a continuity announcer on radio 4 is a case in point. I'm sure they tell him to ham it up as much as possible so that even the thickest of their listeners (and I include myself in this category)will know they are employing an ethnically diverse range of announcers. It makes him sound like a caricature, and it just sounds a bit surreal when he's introducing the Archers (an every day story of country folk); for that job they really need a full on Eddy Grundy style ooh aaar merchant.
I'm not thinking so much about comprehensibility, but how "modern" it feels.
Some modern British variants of English sound pretty strange: not as much as Chaucer, but comparable with Shakespeare. Geordie (Newcastle) is a good example.
The sad thing about this is that people using local accent or dialects are often looked down upon as being uneducated
I think the opposite it true. Politically correctness has lead to all ways of speaking being treated as equally good, so a regional accent now excuses bad grammar and worse.
Knowing how to speak in a way that is easily comprehensible outside your region is an essential part of education. Any literate person can easily do this because written English is less subject to regional variations - even the difference between British and American English diminishes a lot.
now it has taken over as normal speech for most Brits under50 no matter where they are from
A bit pessimistic. Its much worse than my experience.
That isn't language evolving or modernising ..that is language degrading to the lowest common denominator ..and losing it's variety and vocabulary at the same time
Exactly.
"Shut it you slag!" Followed by "leave it out bruv he ain't worth it"
The sad thing about this is that people using local accent or dialects are often looked down upon as being uneducated
I think the opposite it true.
Really? Try going for a job interview in some areas of the UK using a rough local accent. I think you will find those that can speak better fare better in these situations. :)
Try going for a job interview in some areas of the UK using a rough local accent. I think you will find those that can speak better fare better in these situations. :)
True. I should have said the opposite can be true - it depends on the people involved.
It can be very difficult to be sure, but I think i have observed it.
It is one of those things it is difficult to be sure of: there are often multiple reasons why one person may be prejudiced against another. I can think of one incident where I suspect someone was found something to dislike in my accent, or my ethnicity, or my education (better than his) - or possible the combination.
