Things with words doing II
Part I of this is getting long, so I might as well start another.
Redundancies was one I meant to do yesterday, and forgot.
- The reason why. Superfluous.
- The British “in an hour’s time.” Really superfluous. Why is “in an hour’s time” better than “in an hour”? It isn’t. It doesn’t add anything. Once you notice it, it sounds incredibly stupid.
It’s amusing that BBC presenters thoroughly mispronounce “Barack” when Catherine Sangster of the BBC Pronunication Unit has told them and everyone how it’s done. Doesn’t the BBC Pronunication Unit catch prominent mistakes of this kind? I mean the guy’s name comes up pretty often – you’d think someone would eventually notice. And they must get mail.
His name should be pronounced buh-RAAK oh-BAA-muh. When he first came to prominence, there was some disagreement about his first name, which was also sometimes pronounced buh-RACK or even BARR-uhk, but our recommendation is based on the pronunciation he uses himself…
Well quite. (And by the way it’s basically the same as Baruch – so it’s not as alien as all that.)
And then there’s the British insistence on pronouncing every single French word or name with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable, which is pretty much always wrong. Balzac, Renoir, Degas, Sarkozy, Chirac, café, etc etc etc.
But there’s also the Yank way with the letter T. Budder, bedder, pidder padder.
So it goes.
I’m curious why you’re so against reasons why, Ophelia. All languages I’ve encountered use some backups to help understanding, which are not absolutely necessary. For example, I don’t really have to say I’m brushing my teeth, since I’m unlikely to be brushing yours. Reasons why, as opposed to insipid reasons that, have been in English since at least 1200. The OED’s earliest quotation is from Ancrene Riwle: “reisun of the veiunge, hwi isaie ueieth hope & silence.” And, as I pointed out in the earlier thread, times when and places where are completely standard.
Under ‘cock-fight’, the OED has an interesting quotation from Wesley (the Methodist), 1748: “There was to begin in an hour’s time a famous cockfight.” The trouble here is the vague ‘in’. Self-evidently, the fight is to begin in some hour or other. Annoying, and probably misleading, precision would require something like ‘within one hour’. In British English, I think, ‘in an hour’s time’ is understood to mean ‘after approximately 75 minutes, allowing for some unscheduled faffing.’
It’s unfair to attack people who speak French badly, or not at all, for putting syllable stresses in French names. I once had a vague idea how Czechs say Dvorak, but it’s damn difficult for English speakers. The BBC does try with Angela Merkel – g as in get, not as in gesture. But it would be unreasonable to expect German vowel sounds.
Voicing of intervocalic consonants is common in the development of languages, so theres no reason why Yanks need feel guilty about budder.
Doesn’t the BBC Pronunication Unit catch prominent mistakes of this kind?
The oh-so-knowing, oh-so-ignorant, sham-oldhand ‘Poonjab’ often heard on even the BBC World Service is such an irritant. When it’s sometimes transliterated with an A and sometimes with a U, don’t they realise that somebody somewhere is struggling to try to tell them something?
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I’m not attacking people! You sound like Moonbeam. Get in the spirit of the thing – this is petulant kvetching about language; it’s not supposed to be totally reasonable.
Reasons why; no, I know; that’s why I usually don’t tweak it when I’m editing other people. Sometimes it probably does help understanding. Other times it’s…silly.
I’m not attacking people for getting French systematically wrong – but I fail to see why they couldn’t get it right. I’m not talking about saying Angela the German way, I’m simply talking about putting the stress in the right place instead of invariably the wrong one. That’s not so difficult, and France is after all right next door. I’m thinking of the BBC in particular, which of course is where I hear it the most. They should just learn the right stress, and then other people would pick it up from them. Instead the opposite happens. It’s not as if English always hits the first syllable hard; it doesn’t.
Speaking of grammatical sentences and such. Why do I always get the image of someone farting in bed when I think of Chomsky’s “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” sentence.
Or am I just weird?*
*Don’t answer that.
Ophelia commented on the disappearance of the schwa somewhere in the first thread but I seem to notice it all the time in words where the vowel follows the letter d. A friend invited me to admire her guard-en and an announcer mentioned Vice President Bide-en. For one thing, it changes the stresses, and for another it alters the rules of syllabification, at least in the first word.
As for the bidder/ bitter question, though I don’t find it attractive, I can live with it. Years ago, when I was studying acting, I took a diction class and the teacher corrected us for that flaw. She also corrected us for overcompensating and exaggerating the double t followed by an l in “liTTul” or “boTTul.” There is a technique for articulating one’s ts.
Actually, the biggest problem our teacher had with us was in getting us to pronounce both syllables in the word “squirrel.” We were all from south Florida and refused to believe that the word was pronounced as spelled. We had never heard anyone say it in any manner other than “skwirl.” Years later my British husband laughed at me for saying it in one syllable, but I felt vindicated recently when I heard Mike Myers talking about his Canadian friends trying to get his Liverpudlian father to say the word. They couldn’t believe that he articulated the second syllable either, so it must be a North American standard.
If Obama wanted Brits to pronounce his first name as he does (usually), he probably should have stuck to Barry (which he allegedly used at college). See
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/004196.html
What with Panjab and Beijing (or whatever it is this year), this foreign place-names thing is getting out of hand. Are we supposed to say Zuerich like the Swiss? And (roughly) Parree? And (roughly) Atheenay?
Inconsistently with that, I find that Don Gee-o-van-ee irritates me. (Jovan-nee is much nearer.)
I thought everyone in Murka said skwirl. It’s a standing joke in our household.
One thing that I find annoying is the way “bias”, as an adjective, is driving out “biased”. As in: “Rogue thinks that Remy is basically a good guy, but she’s bias about that.”
A Murkan oddity that I find … odd: the use of “a couple Xs”, rather than “a couple of Xs”. “Emma found a couple useful guns in the Morlock tunnel the other day.”
Nicholas you’re being just a tiny bit humorless. I don’t really feel guilty about saying budder – but if I’m going to talk smack about lawr n order it seems only right to admit my own funny noises. But I don’t actually fret about them.
I say squirrel, kind of self-consciously and with an effort…That feels like a newish thing, but I can’t remember how or why. Maybe I used to say sqwirl and it suddenly started sounding sloppy to me.
Which brings up comfortable. It’s the same with that. I don’t like comfterble any more, so I say all the syllables, but I’ve had big arguments with people who say that’s wrong – that comfterble is Korrect. And no they weren’t linguists, they meant Korrect in the demotic sense – it obaze the rool. Anybody? Do you say comfterble or comfortable?
And speaking of syllables (stay calm, Nicholas) I’ve started getting irritated at the British distaste for them. We all swallow some of them, but they swallow too many. P’lice. Med’sin. Sekkitry. Pentagn.
Cumftuhboo, if I’m being pedantic and humourless. Otherwise, cumfee.
Alas, I say “comfterble”. I.e. CUMF-tuh-bull.
Here’s one that’ll probably attract some disagreement. It’s the use of what strikes me as a fussy, overly-precise locution in literary dialogue, trying to avoid the unloved, lower-class word “got”.
“Emma smiled. “I’ve a lovely Sentinel robot to give Magnus for his birthday,’ she said.”
I don’t know anyone who uses “I’ve a” like that, but maybe it’s just a regional and class thing, what with me coming from a working class Australian family. Still, to my inner ear, it would always be:
“I’ve got a lovely Sentinel robot to give Magnus for his birthday.”
OR
“I have a lovely Sentinel robot to give Magnus for his birthday.”
My disbelief always comes out of suspension when I encounter dialogue in a work of fiction that has it the first way with just plain “I’ve a”. Do people really talk in that toffy way where you live?
I’ve corresponded with the BBC pronunciation unit, who told me that in the ordinary course of things, they can’t tell presenters or newsreaders that those peoples’ pronunciations are wrong; the job of the pronunciation unit is to provide information when presenters or newsreaders ask. On the other hand, they also told me that they put out a kind of fact sheet every day giving the pronunciation of unfamiliar words that are likely to come up in the news that day, given the stories that are breaking. That would seem to be at odds with what they had just said in the same message about the policy of letting the presenters and newsreaders come to them. So that’s all as clear as mud.
Wait a second. How are you supposed to say <i>squirrel</i>? Two syllables?
I don’t think Natasha said it that way.
Kvetch? – you want kvetch? Why all of a sudden is the whole UK saying: “I’m good”, “meet with”, and “haitch”? And I’ve rarely met a ‘whereby’ that couldn’t be more simply expressed with a ‘where’. Oh yes – and if you mean ‘simple’, then say it; ‘simplistic’ means ‘half-baked’.
mef
People’s – peoples’ would only make sense in an anthropological sense.
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You ask why the English pronounce French words as we do, and the reason is simple. Because we’re not bloody French. When a word from one language enters another then its pronunciation can change. The French have many English words in their language but pronounce them as they want to. This is not a problem. Birmingham, Alabama, is pronounced differently from Birmingham, West Midlands, but the American version is not wrong, even though it was named after the English version.
As to superfluities, yes, they are redundant, but so what? Language develops its own rules and idioms, and those idiosyncrasies create communities, and art. So much of language is superfluous, but that can provide flexibility of thought, and make a space for expression.
Say sqwirl. It isn’t incorrect, it’s an accent. Revel in it. Languages and dialects are disappearing because they are ‘wrong’. Relish the difference, don’t nit pick.
In the last language post a commenter complained about the letter ‘L’ sounding like a ‘W’ on the BBC World Service.
This same thing happens to people raised in or near Pittsburgh, PA. It doesn’t happen with every letter ‘L’, but only in certain words.
For example, the word ‘Building’ becomes ‘Buiwding’ and ‘People’ becomes ‘Peopwe.’ And the last ‘Powell’ becomes a slurry of Ws, something like “Poweww.’
Having left the Pittsburgh region over 20 years ago, I have lost the overall dialect in terms of vowel pronunciation, but for the life of me I can’t shake the ‘L to W’ without great effort. I have to force my tongue to touch the back of my two upper front teeth.
It always seems strange to me to hear the word “woman” used as an adjective rather than “female.” This is very common but it still sounds wrong. Just me?
@ 17
No, me too! (“…to me, too?” Too self-conscious on these word-Nazi threads…)
Then I learn that for some reason feminists prefer “woman” to “female.” (At least, I think that’s what I heard. It’s so hard to keep up…)
A somewhat related article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html
which the WSJ has labeled, “Does language influence culture?”
I’m going to defend “reason why”, on the simple grounds that the phrase “reason why not” exists.
As for “an hour’s time”, consider it a clarification before the question. The phrase “an hour” is ambiguous in and of itself. Is it “an hour” from now? Maybe “an hour” from some as-yet unexplained time in the future? How about “an hour” total? If you want to clearly indicate that you’re measuring time from the present, then “an hour’s time” is a pretty succinct way of doing it.
Redundancy is the duplication of information. In language, it doesn’t count if some of that information was supplied by the listener as an assumption – the assumption may be wrong, after all. I’m bothered much more by a lack of clarity than by a conditionally redundant embellishment.
Charles Sullivan: Will you kindly inform the residents of that great city that it should be pronounced Pits-burra, like the scot’s Burgh as found in Edinburgh, Fraserburgh, Jedburgh and Roxburgh.
To be honest, why have we changed the usage of some foreign cities such as Bombay/Mumbai or Peking/Beijing when,as was pointed out by an earlier commenter, we do not change Paris to Paree or Rome to Roma. We still call it Spain rather than Espana and Italy rather than Italia; we do not complain at the French calling our capital Londres, so who decided to change Bombay and Peking?
Cultural sensitivities?
I was going to say, “Count down to Nicholas Lawrence bemoaning everyone else’s pet peeves, while righteously explaining why we’re not entitled to them (as he goes on at length about his own),” but then I see he beat me by 21 comments. Quel surprise.
Fine. I’ll accept that. Why? Because I understand that people have personal, subjective tastes about such things. Now, how about you try that too, Nicholas, and stop being such an asshole about other peoples’ tastes?
One of the key problems with the Balzac-Sarkozy problem, to go back to the top, is that syllabic stress in English and French is simply different. English is like a seesaw, always up and down, French is like a typewriter, rat-a-tat, all on the same stress. It’s almost impossible to switch from a stressed to an unstressed pronunciation pattern in mid-sentence.
Meanwhile, tee-hee:
http://xkcd.com/774/
I am not a scholar of English and neither am I an English scholar. Nor Chinese ditto. But Psimon at #15 makes an important point:
“As to superfluities, yes, they are redundant, but so what? Language develops its own rules and idioms, and those idiosyncrasies create communities, and art. So much of language is superfluous, but that can provide flexibility of thought, and make a space for expression.”
The apparent superfluities are redundant controls. ” Me Tarzan; you Jane,” would be a literal translation out of the Chinese, and while incorrect in English would be correct in the Chinese, at least in my experience of that language. (In the Tarzan films starring Johnny Weismuller it was used to emphasise the idea that Tarzan was raw nature shed of inflexions and stripped back to its bare and lusty essentials.)
“Me name Tarzan; you name Jane” would be closer to the way a Chinese Tarzan would say it.
“My name is Tarzan, and your name I presume is Jane. How do you do?” (A routine exchange of pleasantries follows.)
That would have been the line if Weismuller had been replaced by say, David Niven or John Mills. The possessive “my” and “your” leaves less for the listening Jane to work out for herself, therefore requiring a less alert Jane in an English jungle than would be needed in a Chinese one.
@ Nick Lawrence #6
No, because there is no umlaut on Zurich in the English speaking world. Nevertheless, if you were speaking German, or rather, Swiss German dialect and employed the English version, it would be out of place. A lot of people think in their own language whilst speaking another and it does not always go hand in hand.
While it’s easy to become a pedantic bore about the regional differences in spoken language, I still maintain that care should be taken with what we write, otherwise communication can be severely impaired. Take a look at this account, for example:
http://www.clearest.co.uk/files/CowsInseminatedBySeamen.pdf
I put emphasis on two syllables in SQUIR- REL.
I like American and British (and Indian and Australian and…) pronunciation. The different wordplay and rhymes and other possibilities are fun, and we’d be poorer without them. The only thing that brings out my inner hick’s amusement at the ways of others are American TV shows having to subtitle any accent they think the locals aren’t cosmopolitan enough to understand.
Oddly I frequently get annoyed at the American insistence on emphasising the first syllable in many English words, just as as a Briton and Northerner I dislike ‘Eye-raq’ and ‘Afghanistaaan’ (and it took me a while to not wince at ‘write me’.)
As for ‘Barack’ – I don’t think it’s that straightforward an issue. It is reasonable to pronounce words in other languages in the way native speakers of those languages would, since there aren’t British English equivalents, but if I hear Barack say his name I will assume it is his American accent which is responsible for the long second ‘a’, and so I will continue to pronounce it with a short ‘a’, as makes sense with my accent. I don’t think Southerners saying ‘barth’ are pronouncing it incorrectly against my ‘bath’; they’re both valid because accents affect how vowels are pronounced, and I don’t see why Barack should be any different.
On a related note – and I know we Brits are only halfway there ourselves – but I can’t stand the American ‘Van Go’ for ‘Van Gogh’. It’s just not even trying.
“It’s just not even trying.” And, that is the rub of it. NPRers, take note when yer is substituted for the two different words, “your” and “you’re”: or fer for for: or wer for were or we’re. I could go on, but it is no pleasure listening to laziness. Language and thought are inseparable. Listening to the mind as it wags its tongue is the correction of habit — bad habit. Just try learning a foreign language as an adult, living over c’s. It ain’t easy, but it has the virtue of getting one to shut up and listen. Maybe. The effort continues after years abroad and several returned. It becomes a new and conscious habit at which one improves; and that is the reward for trying.
Lots of new rules to follow here. I’m going to have to study hard.
Heehee.
Uh…….wot? I don’t follow at all. “I’ll be there in an hour” is ambiguous while “I’ll be there in an hour’s time” clears it right up? What else could “I’ll be there in an hour” mean?!
To put it another way, it’s an ambiguity that we in the US seem to be sublimely unaware of. We simply never say things like “in a year’s time.”
Amma ax you nicely not to describe the sins of some godawful dialects specific to England (the boring one next to Scotland and Wales) as characterizsing ‘contemporary British English’. If it’s not too big of a request, go get it gotten out of your system. Now I shall get back to drawring mummaw’s motacawh.
Pronunciation? I just think WWRTD – what would Richard Todd do?
Hour’s time – along with ‘period of time’ it’s also one of my pet peeves. But it does – I think unnecessarily – try to distinguish occasion (making a date) from duration (taking an hour); it’s a replacement for archaic ‘hence’.
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Will post again with proper paragraph breaks.
I found one of my pet peeves in about five minutes skimming of Aldaily this morning.
politicians appear all too-willing to accommodate new varieties of rent seeking
The two things are not mutually-incompatible.
I was fifty-years-old
I imagine these pointless hyphens are picked up from constructions like “fact-seeking mission” or “heat-detecting missiles” or “bomb-disposal expert”. The Guardian does that all the time.
Yes! Lots of Brits do. Well, several, anyway. I spend a lot of editorial time removing random hyphens.
A common form of hyphen misuse
The adverbial suffix ly should never be followed by a hyphen, because it is already serving the same function as a hyphen and so there is no possibility of misconstruction to be guarded against. I know what an easily broken bottle is, but what is an ‘easily bottle’? I know what a highly acclaimed actor is, but what is a ‘highly actor’? You only need to guard against possible misconstructions – that’s why compound adjectives are hyphenated – not impossible ones.
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I think that there is an American tendency to strive for brevity that can go too far. My cousin was recently visiting me from the UK and was driven to apoplexy by the phrase “Thank you for shopping The Home Depot”. No doubt they save a lot of money by not printing the word “at”, but it does sound inelegant. My earlier celebration of linguistic change and difference may have been a bit too hasty.
As an aside the phrase “Thank you for shopping The Home Depot” would have a different meaning in the UK. Shop is synonymous with snitch, so the sentence would read “Thank you for informing the police of The Home Depot’s criminal acts.”
Oh, both teams do that. UKanians have lots of short forms, some of them horribly cutesy – cardie, bikky, other diminutives.
Still, I do hate “graduate high school.” And “teens.”
American’s complaining about the way names are pronounced?
Exactly what sprang (?) to mind when reading # 40. Grrrrrrrrr! But I guess I’m too used to “teens” to be bothered…rather like “seniors.”
@ #33. OTOH, “at this time” seems to have driven out “now” in the US. It’s just idiom, so I’m not particularly fussed about it – but I do find it amusing. Apparently “now” is too short and unimportant-sounding, or something.
Well you won’t catch me doing that. I hate silly pomposities like that.
Deepak, well this American, yes. You think all Americans should be disqualified because some Americans aren’t genius pronouncers? Surely not! I don’t say Eye-rack, nor do I say Eye-rann. I rest my case. :- )
Preventative? How very inventative! Derived from preventation, is it?
How about a Butterflies & Wheels Caconym Corner?
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Right, I’ll see you and raise you an orientated. In the US it’s oriented.
Not sure if the following could be classified as true caconyms, but as this and the preceding thread seem to have invited a wide variety of pet language peeves, I’ll throw a few of mine in as well (all American English transgressions, as far as I’m aware):
1. “All intensive purposes” (all intents and purposes)
2. “Suppose to” *, (supposeD to)
3. “Supposably” (I know it’s a real word, but most people really mean ‘supposEDly when they say this’)
4. “Acrost” (I’ve never seen it spelled this way, but many people pronounce the phantom ‘t’ at the end)
5. The use of “anymore” in lieu of “lately” or “nowadays”, e.g. “I do yoga every night anymore”.
6. The use of “nonplussed” to mean “put off” or “chagrined” (I guess it sounds…”negative”?)
*My 9 year old wrote a sentence during the dictation portion of a test last spring which included “supposed to” (properly written out, gawd love ‘im). BUT, the (adult) grader marked it wrong and “corrected” it to “suppose to”. I struggled to remain silent, just as I do every term when the report cards arrive, in which the teacher comments are full of grammatical errors. grrrrr.
I realize language is a fluid, evolving entity, but evolution through sheer laziness just seems like a cheat. Sigh.
Then there are mistakes in the use of prepositions: “different to” instead of “different from” (the former has almost driven out the latter and become the accepted use, so I admit this is not the best example); “bored of” instead of “bored with”; and so on. “Scott was getting bored of Emma’s way of seeming distant just when he needed emotional support.” Ugh!
And yet ‘tired of’ is perfectly normal… Or is it?!? Help, I can’t tell any more….
I thought USians said ‘different than’…?
@OB #33
Look, I know this is supposed to be a jolly thread enjoying some kvetching and a salmon bagel, but I thought you also cared about sources, OB. There are 21 million Google hits for “in a year’s time”. Ah, but I’m searching from batty old England and theyre all UK sites, you reply. No they arent, actually, but I cant be bothered to check the proportion. I want to get back to my salmon bagel. There are 23000 hits if I limit it to the .edu domain.
Now, for the millions of people who use the (illogical, youre completely right about that) idiom “in an hour’s time”, and know, by mutual convention, what it means, “in an hour” causes (probably momentary) doubt and confusion. (Diddums, you correctly reply.) Which hour? Some hour we mentioned earlier, like 2 o’clock this afternoon? The hour of the Second Coming? Yes yes, all daft, but I assure you that’s how people who are used to one idiom process another they arent used to.
@Russell
Oy vey. Oy vey. That would be why there are 72 million Google hits for ‘different from’, and 7 million for ‘different to’. An appalling number on the first pages are mindless peeving about ‘different to’ being ‘wrong’. As I nerdily and annoyingly pointed out in the other thread, the OED notes that
Which brings me back to the only question underlying all this that I actually think is interesting.
For what (doubtless varying) reasons do speakers of a given language so much enjoy jeering at something that millions of speakers of that language say? Is it wanting to feel smarter than someone else I label an ignorant hick? Or a deep fear that English (which changed less in the 20th century than in any previous century) will change so much that my great-grand-children wont be able to understand my scintillating posts in the Butterflies archive (as if)? Or a fear (or hope?) that US/ UK/Australian (etc) English will become mutually unintelligible? Or what?
Preventative / Caconym Corner
Oh dear, I think I’ve been misstaken. Not a barb against nation, site, or person. A general observation and, because it’s such fun, a suggestion for a permanent home.
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Why do so many (Dawkins for example) feel that ‘that’ needs automatically to be followed by a comma? It doesn’t. And this superfluity will most likely be compounded by leading on to false parentheses.
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If only we had an academie anglaise to order us all to do this and not that.
We could all bitch about them being completely and obviously wrong, instead of each other.
Nicholas, you really don’t get it. *sigh* Some of us are actually quite sophisticated about these things, you know (after all, I’ve done, ahem, a certain amount of professional writing and editing, and as for Ophelia …), but the point of the thread is to sound off about things that annoy us or strike us as unaesthetically displeasing, even if we know it’s not totally reasonable in all cases. A lot of these things really are matters of aesthetics, and I for one do not believe that aesthetic judgments can be justified all the way down. No one is trying to do anything as futile as that.
But thank you for the information that “different from” currently gets a lot more google hits than “different to”; that’s something I wouldn’t have guessed.
Bugger it: “aesthetically displeasing”. I really should use the goddamn preview function.
Y’all know, the London Telegraph did an article about this a year or so ago. I took all the favorite responses, or most irritating expressions and phrases, and formated them into 6 booklets. In those six booklets there are about 350 (maybe more!), and that was only half the original responses. I really, really do pass these booklets about; they get lottsa laughs. There is a vast amount to learn/unlearn. A real “edjihkayshin”, as they say on NPAHR. Just ask and yuh kin git yer own as an email attachment. Attise@verizon.net.>
Russell:
In my experience, Americans just don’t say “different to.” It’s a British thing that has apparently infected y’all down under.
Prepositions are weird. Different peoples use different spatial schemas, and that affects the choice of prepositions.
For example, in some places (in Africa I believe) when you say that some object is “in front of” some other object, you don’t mean that it’s between you and that other object, as though the other object was facing toward you, and the object in question was in front of it. It means that it’s on the opposite side of that other object from you, as though that other object was facing the same way as you, and the object in question was in front of it.
“Different from” seems right to me in the sense that “from” connotes divergence, with “similar to” likewise expressing convergence.
On the other hand, “different to” can seem right if I think about it, with an image of bringing one thing to another, and comparing them to see the difference. The convergence brings out the difference. (We compare to, and once we’ve brought one to the other, we can contrast with, to see how they’re different from, I guess)
Oh Nicholas, honestly – do give it a rest. As Russell says, we know all that, or we assume it’s there to be known. We’re just kvetching. Nobody is going to be converted to prescriptivism as a result of these two threads.
Not denying your experience, but there are 59000 hits for ‘different to’ in the domain .edu. Some of them don’t count: eg ‘looking for something different to grill’. Lots of them are ‘a is different to b’.
@Russell
Agreed. But I find it hard to see how there can be an aesthetic judgement about ‘different to’ any way down at all. I repeat my question. Why do people get so peeved about trivial differences in language usage?
OB: Sorry, cross-posted. Yes, I’ll shut up now.
:- )
No need to shut up, but you could take the thread as it’s intended; I think we all know that the level of irritation is not rational, but we like to vent anyway.
Thanks for knowing what that L is (on the earlier thread) even though not what it’s called. The place I hear it most is on the NPR interview show Fresh Air; the host Terri Gross grew up in Brooklyn. I can’t detect a pattern – she uses it sometimes and not others. I wonder if it’s a special Brooklyn L.
How about “mission” for “invasion” and “occupation”?
How about “mission accomplished” for “fubar”?
Thanks. I’d foolishly failed to grasp that your kind of kvetching is supposed to be evidence-free :- ) . (Someone should tell Mooney to say he’s only kvetching about New Atheists. :- )
What’s wrong with both parts of this thread is that all the peeves are the same old boring stuff we’ve all heard a million times, except your request to we-Brits :- ) to say Sarkozy proper, comme il faut.
Now what really makes me incandescent is people who go on about ‘sycophants’ at the Intersocktion, when they mean toadies. A sycophant is someone who informs on an illegal exporter of figs.
Then there’s the awful Murkan split newspapers. ‘The times’ was one word in Latin (tempora). Therefore it should be The Times New York, not The New York Times.
Oh, and how could I have forgotten those pesky announcers on France Musique who have invented a mad pronunciation of Poulenc purely to intimidate everyone else, including their compatriots? Poulenc himself, of course, pronounced his name Pool. The nc ending is silent, just like the nt in (ils) parlent.
Post Production? Why does the film industry need so many? What do they do with them all?
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Hahaha – tempora, The Times New York; that’s a good one.
Now here’s another item (I mentioned I was subbing) – news presenters tend to say it a lot – X did Y before she died. Well no kidding; she wouldn’t have done it after, would she!
A version I just read is “during the course of his lifetime, X” did whatever it was. Well when else would he have done it?!
@44:
Even worse is “at this point in time”. I remember during the Watergate scandal when that was roundly mocked for its pretension when Nixon’s henchmen used it; then in what seemed a mere twinkling it became part of the language. Gaah.
I even dimly remember a mock-Chaucerian poem about the scandal that appeared in (I think) Newsweek magazine. It ended “…nor know what man will answyr to what cryme / No oon can know At Thysse Pointe In Tyme.”
Indeed. I still scowl when I hear it. I must say though, I hear it a lot less than I hear “in a week’s time.”
Other extreme irritants:
1]
It is no more difficult to say or to write “The princess’s hair” than it is “The princess is here”. The boss’s wife – Father Christmas’s reindeers – say it and write it! And, no, three esses can never be brought together; no proper ways of formation can ever do so; unlike Ross-shire & Inverness-shire – hence the need for hyphens. It doesn’t say much for reasoning ability or critical thinking to conflate such as these with plural possessives.
2]
Pronouncing ‘a/an’ and preconsonantal ‘the’ with anything other than a schwa.
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