Jedediah would like a word with thee.
Posted on 10/27/2011 9:24:22 PM PDT by traumer
Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter."
"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said. Fiennes, full name Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, said that students at drama schools were especially suffering thanks to social networking sites.
"I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, (students) a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."
The actor's directorial debut, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, premiered at the London Film Festival this week. Fiennes questioned whether the playwright was even relevant in a time of dumbed-down English language.
He said: "I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English langyuage, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant? But I love this language we have and what it can do, and aside from that I think the themese in his plays are always relevant."
Fiennes, who does not use Twitter, is not alone in his theory. JP Davidson, the author of Planet Word and a linguistic expert, talked this week about longer words dying out in favour of shortened text message-style terms. He said: “You only have to look on Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used say in Shakespeare’s plays or PG Wodehouse novels — both of them avid inventors of new words
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
To give an example of a language change that was for the worse...we no longer have a distinction between 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural. If I say “This is for you”, I could be talking to one person or a group of people. Wouldn’t it be nice to have ‘Thee’, ‘Thou’ and ‘Thine’ back to get that distinction?
LOL WTF FTW!
Contractions are part of the same drive, making the language faster to get the point across. Kids writing term papers that way is the fault of teachers, they failed to teach the kids the difference between casual and formal language and term papers shouldn’t be written the way you talk.
The reason that “movement” failed is because it was a fad not a movement, and more importantly it was a fad with only one subsection of society. It never came into general usage. General usage changes language, fads are bumps along the road.
The word irony doesn’t mean what it used to. Look again at that sentence I put in yesterday. The reason that sentence wouldn’t have made sense 20 years ago is a whole bunch of those words have had new meaning assigned. A browser used to just be somebody that browses, now it’s a tool to view the world on your computer. Mice used to just be rodents. Flat and screen never got combined.
Doesn’t really matter if I’m OK with it. That’s my my point. These changes happen, they’re inevitable. I can see how those happened, “would’ve” in speech became “woulda” in the 70s and then somewhere along the lines people tried to expand it back out but thought the v was an f and “would of” was born. It happens. No amount of complaining is going to make it change. Teachers can grade down for it and remove it from formal language, but in the common usage it’s gonna stay... at least until the next change. Wonder if it’ll become “would’f”.
I blame many things, but mostly I fault the rise and acceptance of profanity in casual, public conversation, as well as in movies, tv, and print.
No, thee thou and thine sound silly in the modern context. They’re antiquated words. They went away a long time ago and for good reason. You pretty much always know in context how many people “you” is (cool I made a grammatically correct you is, that’s funny) they don’t need separate words.
In spoken language, ‘would’ve’ and ‘would of’ are homophones so for all intents and purposes it doesn’t matter which one the person thinks they are saying. But they need to know which is which when they write.
But folks mostly don’t write. That’s part of what’s going on with a lot of this stuff. People talk all the time, but write rarely (unless they hang out on internet boards), then they’re cranking out an e-mail and they realize they don’t actually know the real words behind half the crap they say, especially when you’re a fan of contracts. When I say or write “I’m” I don’t think “I am” and shrink it, I think “I’m” in my brain (and the spell checker) “I’m” is a word. And it could be a word I’ve used so regularly and consistently I don’t even know what the parts are. Nobody says “would have”, between the contraction and the fact that it’s part of a sentence structure that people don’t use often it’s not something on the everyday tongue. So when they do try to use it they get it wrong. Of course if they do it enough it stops being wrong. That’s how language works.
Good for Jeb. He should glue his beard better.
Ralph could lose (or is that loose?) the beard.
I don’t think would of and would’ve will ever be accepted substitutes for one another. Not in standard English anyway.
You can always tell they aren’t real Amish when they pose for the photo - which real Amish would never do.
Sure they will. 99% of what you and I have written today wasn’t acceptable English a few hundred years ago. Heck a good chunk of it wasn’t even not acceptable English not that long ago. Evolving languages evolve.
They still haven’t gotten ‘ain’t’ fully accepted. And that’s been a long standing thing.
The only people that don’t accept ain’t are English teachers. It’s in the dictionary, the rest of the population uses it, and even the English teachers know what it means. It’s quite accepted.
The point is that it’s a slang term. It’s still not accepted written English.
It’s a word that gets used and has been used by most of the population for centuries and everybody knows what it mean. It doesn’t fit in formal English but most contractions don’t. It’s fine as informal writing. Really only English teachers care, and nobody really cares what they think.
If you write it in a business letter or on a job application the people who read it will care. It’s a notch about using “innit” for ‘isn’t it’.
a notch “above”
Business letter = formal shouldn’t be including any contractions in that much less ain’t.
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