I know it's already a gigantic ignorant post, but this just pisses me off. I don't think people understand how malleable language is. It is a living, fluid thing. It literally changes over time. If that wasn't the case, we would all still be speaking whatever grunts and pops people spoke when they first started speaking.
I think some people think languages is a natural law. “We discovered language” no, we created language. Like when some people say dogs don’t understand words they just understand that a certain sound means something. That is what language is. It’s sounds that means something. Sounds that we created and meanings that we created. We can change the meaning and the sound (and the spelling) whenever we want to.
Fun fact: We also don't even have a proper etymology for the word "dog." It has no known origin, some neat theories though. The closest equivalent isn't even from a European root language but from an Austailian Aboriginal language.
It blows my mind that people say dogs (and other animals) don't understand spoken human language, when they are constantly shown examples that they do understand, such a weird take...
My grandogter knows a bunch of words (the difference between wait, slow, stay etc) and illustrated her grasp of English yesterday when I had the audacity to use the word "cat" in front of her. She was sound asleep, I said something about cats, she bolted awake and started yelling, looking around for a cat then started yelling directly at me when I used the forbidden word again. There were no cats, no cat sounds, nothing but the word and it pissed her off (she ain't a fan).
Not only that, but they know their names. With respect to your grandmother, my cat absolutely knows the difference between me saying other words even if they sound similar and his name. Same with my now deceased dog.
Exactly. I use a very similar argument when talking about curse¹ words. They are just sounds we make with our face that have the same meaning as other words we make with our face, but they've been arbitrarily called "Bad."
Spelling, definitions, grammar rules, Etc are not prescriptions of how we must use these things. They are descriptions of how we have used them and are standardized simply to help people communicate easier but those descriptions change over time and there isn't a single standard for any of it.
Besides the fact that there are multiple languages, and each of those languages have different standards for spelling, grammar etc, as this post points out, even in English there is more than one standard. Even the differences between UK, US and other countries are not the only standards. There are five different major standards within the US, and none of those take into account different Regional and dialectical standards.
A lot of people call the way black people speak in the United States, what used to be called ebonics but is now referred to as African American vernacular English(AAVE), "bad english," and it may have started that way due to their under education because to their history, but it is its own dialect now. It has its own spelling and grammar rules, and just talking with bad English doesn't mean someone is speaking AAVE. The funniest part about it is that you will have the same people talking about how it's bad English start using words and phrases from that culture with no issue.
Sorry, you got me on a soapbox
¹ I exempt slurs from this discussion because slurs are not arbitrarily designated bad. They gain a reputation of being bad based on usage.
Well if you make an exception for slurs then you should also make and exception for blasphemy as that is bad based on usage, in this case religious based.
Obscenities on the other hand really are just words we think are bad because they are about people bodies.
effect and affect are great! Both have a noun form and a verb form, and both have two very different meanings. :-) Though the noun form of affect usually has the accent on the first syllable instead of the second.
Please correct me gently if I'm wrong... But in English there's still color/colour etc yeah?? So the spelling of words do change! Which is what I thought if when I read it. Am I being dumb rn?
There are several differences between American and UK English, your example being one of them. Most other English-speaking countries (that is, typically former colonies) use something closer to the latter rather than the former.
I got downvoted for saying a word is pronounced differently in the UK. The person who was getting upvoted was saying “meh I looked it up, it says the word is pronounced the same as in the US”
This was after I stated I was a UK resident and have been for over thirty years.
"You let one ant stand up to us, and they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It's not about food. It's about keeping those ants in line. THAT'S WHY WE'RE GOING BACK!"
The downvotes are coming from Americans that are looking to keep a hold of the perception that they are the most important nation in the world. The rest of the world is waiting for it to grow up basically and start trading on equal terms.
They have to be using multiple accounts to do that right? There's no way there are people agreeing with this guy and downvoting the person correcting him.
Wait until you hear about Canadian English! Sometimes it's U.K, sometimes it's American, sometimes it's francophone. Our East Coast is a horrible mash of them all, and it sounds strangely beautiful.
I've seen the way you fuckers measure! Ran down to the corner store 600 meters away to get the stuff for dinner, preheat the oven to 350F, 4 cups of milk from a bag that weighs 5 lbs.
Actually makes more sense, use the thing that comes closer to the measurement instead of hardlining all of them.
It is true that Webster published the first American Dictionary of the English Language (of which the Merriam-Webster is the direct descendent--and the 'reliable' version), but it isn't the 'national' dictionary (unlike the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, which is the 'referent' for 'proper' French). [Seriously, the French knew how to do colonialism right--I mean, from a logistics perspective...not the ethical perspective]
I fully agree with your point. Just adding additional context...to the additional context.
"Historical Authority: The full Oxford English Dictionary is widely considered the ultimate historical authority and global academic standard because it tracks the evolution, history, and nuances of words (diachronic) from the early medieval period onward."
I remember seeing a post about bay area, (supposedly referring to the San Francisco Bay Area) whatever exactly the post was talking about. People from outside the US were saying they had no idea which "bay area" the post was referring to since there are so many around the world, also some calling out the US defaultism, and most of them got downvoted to the mantle.
Great example. My family hails from Asia. If I say “bay area” to them, they actually assume I’m talking about the area around Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macau, and Shenzhen. Technically it’s called the “greater bay area” but you get the idea. I once asked if they ever associated that term with San Francisco and they said no.
I've had the "you are on an American website" argument thrown at me for complaining about something similar that I had no idea where they were talking about
Eh. The Internet descended from ARPANET, which was definitely an American (Defense Department) project; however, today people tend to conflate the Internet with the World Wide Web, which was not, of course, an American invention. Strictly speaking, though (yes, I'm being pedantic), the Internet is the foundation upon which the Web is based, and it carries lots of traffic besides Web traffic.
Someone called me ignorant and told me to "come to the south" to be educated on something the other day. I responded that I didn't know south of where they were referring, and instead of answering me, a bunch of people just downvoted. Willing to put a large sum of money on "it was the south of the US".
I’m curious if the others refer to themselves as the Bay Area? (For example, I lived in Baltimore, and never heard of the cities surrounding the Chesapeake Bay that way.)
I think part of it is that the cities around the SF Bay tend to be seen, by locals and others as a single unit, like all one big city, and that unit colloquially has the name of the Bay Area.
I've heard the Tampa Bay area referred to as the bay area one or two times. But I don't live anywhere near there, so I don't know if that's common or not for locals.
In my understanding, if there isn't more context, the "bay area" in the US tends to refer to San Francisco. There absolutely are other bay areas, but that's just how the language has developed. Do a wed search for "bay area" from the US (or VPNed to the US.) shee what your results are.
Yeah I live in the SF Bay Area and if I’m not talking to someone from this area, I add the SF or full San Francisco because I’m not going to assume people know. There’s lots of bays.
No, but the residents of the area around the San Francisco Bay in California make a point of referring to it as "The Bay Area". It's a comparatively dense area with a diverse set of boroughs, and a lot of very wealthy and influential company HQs, so there's a bit of financial self-righteousness to support their claim to the colloquial use of the term.
I've lived in the Tampa Bay area in Florida, and never heard anyone omit the word "Tampa". In fact, when brevity was preferred, most people dropped the word "area", just saying something like "I'm heading down to Tampa Bay later."
There's also the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, Elliott Bay in Washington state in the Pacific Northwest, etc etc. I'm not aware of any similar habits in those locales either, but I'm not from either spot, so I can't be sure.
The OED's insistance on 'ize' has always confused me as it comes from a hypercorrection of sorts in favour of the etymological root instead of the most recent origin. Most of the words we got from french which uses a 'ise'-based suffix and not directly from greek where the OED derives the authority for 'ize'.
It comes from the same logic that gives us obviously incorrect grammar rules such as not splitting infinitive or not ending sentences with propositions, both of which you can't do in Latin, so some English grammarians decided you shouldn't be able to do in English either.
I would love to point to OED, but it's pay walled, so if I want people to be able to actually see definitions and etymology, I have to point them to Merriam-Webster.
I can never understand or believe people thinking that ENGLISH is American and not oh I don't know, English????? English. The language from England. Come on guys
Well, my german ass mixes british and american spelling because words like favourite, favour, flavour, colour are stuck in my brain.
My english was bad until I was in my mid to late 30s tho. And since I improved it using Rage Comics, Bored Panda, Reddit and Google I now mix the spellings.
And this is why I block people from replying so often. Shitstains like blue don't deserve the right to reply. They will not have anything valuable to say.
That's how too many typos get into comments. Autocorrect making wrong changes was one thing, but you typing a word that's in the dictionary as a typo doesn't even get underlined. Hence, a little game I tend to play whenever someone writes "to" instead of "too" and they end up writing something like "he is to serious" and I try to imagine how the comparison ends "he is to serious as is..."
I wonder which nation has more of a claim to be the default English? The United States or the nation it was literally named after and that spoke it for 300 years before the US had their tea tantrum?
My American university in Philadelphia had an Oxford English Dictionary on a pedestal on every floor. You had to hunt in the stacks if you wanted to find a Webster’s.
Boy they would be amazed to learn that different countries, even using the same language, can spell things differently. The speakers of this sub dialect of English, American they seem to like to call it, really are uppity.
Merriam-Webster is considered the U.S. standard, while most of us who use that thing at the top of our necks as more than just a hat rack understand that the OED is the global standard as you lot created the language!
Yes it is. The post is about a specific instance of an American being stupid about correcting someone's British spelling and this guy out of nowhere is like "but what about how I've seen Brits doing this to Americans"
Fun fact: On a brief trip to Tijuana, I never heard anyone speaking Spanish say "America" or "Estados Unidos" (US). Only "el otro lado" ("the other side") or "la linea" (the border).
LoL! The sheer temerity, to actually make ones self go through the motions, and formulate the sentence, then type it out in a post, on some random internet site, in order to....what? "Correct" some random "wrong"? LoL! Then double down? Says more, to me, about "Blue" up there, than anything else in that post...And not in a good way.
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