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Here are 10 fun etymologies of the day. I'm not sure about the accuracy, but I particularly like the etymology of serendipity.There's more to the etymology of "robot": Karel ?apek or his brother got the word from Czech robota "drudgery, compulsory service". It's cognate with orphan.
It certainly was not my problem. It fit perfectly and conveyed my meaning. Where would we be if Shakespeare or Chaucer's English teachers had told them to stop making up new words?Shakespeare and Chaucer didn't have English teachers. So it is your problem.
"Decimated" literally and originally was "reduced by 10% ("Tithing to the Church decimated my paycheck"), but nowadays it is used to mean "almost completely eliminated".It meant "to select by lot and kill every tenth man of" and "to exact a tax of 10 percent from". Interestingly, according to OED editor Jesse Sheidlower, it has never been used in English to mean "destroy one-tenth of".
Me too. Such a language is completely impossible, in my opinion.The linguistics of Darmok
What's more, I don't believe in Tamarese as described. With regards to language change, it must be in an extraordinarily unstable state. Let's consider the problem of young Tamarians—the children of the Children of Tama, if you will—who, if the language works the way we're told it does, are presented with a seemingly insurmountable language-learning problem.
Though in my defense, I did define "remote past" as "a time before the past events being talked about," which is essentially how you defined the past perfect, goofy.Yes you did, that's true. I must be reacting to ESL students who think that the past perfect should be used for talking about say, dinosaurs.
She had her first baby 6 weeks prior to contacting me. Six years before that, she had had surgery on her right breast due to cancer. One fourth of the breast was removed, and afterwards she underwent radiation therapy. During the surgery the nipple was repositioned, so the nerves and ducts were cut. Four years later a malignant tumor was detected again, this time in her left breast, and unfortunately she had a full mastectomy (the whole breast was removed). This mother found herself pregnant with her now-six-week-old daughter about one year after this second surgery.
We really need a causative in English.We had one: -en. dark darken, wide widen, bright brighten, long lengthen, strong strengthen etc.
Some of both? I agree that schools don't stress much importance in teaching grammar, but I think the amount of communication done electronically has worsened the problem. Where letters were once well-thought-out, many people now find simple things like capitalization a hassle. The focus of getting a message out as quickly as possible just adds to the problem of society's very loose grasp on proper grammar.This is exactly what David Crystal talks about in his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, and he shows that there is no cause for concern.
Text messages aren’t full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them.
These abbreviations aren't a new language - they’ve been around for decades.
They aren't just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days.
Pupils don't routinely put them into their school-work or examinations.
It isn't a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text.
Texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.
When you do typesetting, you realize pretty quickly that a lot of the symbols you need are not on the keyboard, while a lot of symbols on the keyboard are actually used pretty rarely.This is the keyboard you need.
I can't stand when people talk about the city buses. The correct plural is city bi.bus is from omnibus, which is alread a plural in Latin, it's the plural dative of omnis. So in fact the word has no singular, which mean we shouldn't refer to long motor vehicles for carrying passengers in the singular. I've noticed that many people talk about one bus, but this is wrong, meaningless, and offends the senses.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7595509.stmI love how an editor has had to add a bunch of notes correcting a lot of the misconceptions.
Typo Eradication Advancement LeagueJeff Deck has been charged
some prescriptivists like the guy who founded the Typo Eradication Advancement League (who seems to think he's not a prescriptivist).He's the guy who said that typos are "vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language." As if English has not survived most of its life without a standard spelling.
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