Posted on 01/10/2005 10:26:26 PM PST by nickcarraway
"TO WHOM DO YOU THINK YOU ARE SPEAKING, YOUNG LADY????"
"(sigh) Jen...and...I...are going to (wherever)..."
It'll learn you good.
That word appears in many dictionaries, by the way, because it's so commonly used.
The style of many periodicals was more formal half a century ago. Where the language lived was on the sports pages. I also enjoyed the Police Gazette. However, all that said, I think that if you go back and look at the old papers/Reader's Digest etc., you'd see the simplicity of the writing.
This is stupid. Go back 1000 years and english is unrecognizable. On the other hand, El Cid is readable in the original.
English is NOT a stable language.
Irregardless of what you think I is going to Walmarts and buy me a coke anyways. now I axe yas did I miss any?
Not to mention writing "to" for "too" and making a mess of your/you're ,there/their and many others,besides the incorrect conjunction cockups. FR has examples of ALL of the very worst of the worst.Sometimes it's so depressing to read a thread and the replies.
What's wrong with it? Uh, my impression at the time was that the lessons were intended for the sole purpose of writing thank you notes and place cards for dinner parties. It's an actual "thing" they do in L.A., which is trying to duplicate what they perceive as a more gracious period in time. And, of course, they make a mess of it.
How old is your youngest?
Does "friggin'" add value to our verb-rich language?
Your right, its one of my pet peeves. [sic]
It's most clear in Britain where Received Pronunciation (eg, Alistair Cooke, the Queen, Tony Blair) is dead -- no longer even taught at Oxford and Cambridge. And it's happened only in the last 20-25 years. It's been replaced by "Estuary English" which really sounds horrible to my ears. The best example of Estuary English pronunciation is Jamie Oliver. It hurts my ears to hear him. I can't stand it.
Try "may" and "can", Petronski.
"May" denotes permission. While "Can" denotes ability.
Children and many adults know not the difference.
Jack.
A 'linguist', by definition, understands and uses the structure of X number of languages, presumably with a view toward furthering communication between speakers/writers of languages A and B. Or, perhaps, engages in other worthwhile endeavours, for example, translation of either historical documents or the straightforward translation from language to language in order to facilitate communication in the 'real' world. These aren't any part of Chomsky's CV, even though he is fluent in 5 (6?, sorry, can't recall just now) languages.
Chomsky's academic expertise, as published, deals with what are called ''formal grammars'', and has been quite useful in the development of computer languages -- a result, btw, that he did NOT anticipate. Chomsky, at his early best, was to language what Bertrand Russell was, at his early best, to formal logic.
I won't waste your time recounting the subsequent and unfortunate history of these two gents' psychopathy after they abandoned their respective fields of expertise, and at some point decided to make a subsidiary career by telling the rest of the world how to live.
Their wildly misplaced assumptions about their competence, and their subsequent insistence about expertising upon social and political issues resembles very strongly the similar phenomenon we see today of some number of alleged actors named Baldwin, as well as the occasional Streisand, who offer similar, although far, far less coherent, ''expertise''.
Damned shame, too, isn't it!
Yes, public education, taxes, lawyers, Clinton, the unions and OSHA have all devolved our language to a series of grunts and snorts.
Personally, I think a good argument can be made that English is a pidgin of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman French with a smattering of Latin (including hunks of the grammar imported by smarty-pants academics that thought English should work more like Latin) and other languages. There is a reason why it has so many irregular forms (e.g., ox/oxen uses the Danish pluralization while horse/horses uses the Anglo-Saxon pluralization), why we pluralize many Latin words with Latin inflections rather than English inflections (e.g., data instead of datums), and why we've got at least two words for all sorts of things because we got one word via the Germanic language family and the other word from the French language family (e.g., chicken/poultry, big/large, etc.). Oh, and then there are the throwbacks to non-existant forms such as "a pair of pants". Ask anyone who has tried to learn English as a second language. It's really quite a mess.
The writing was NOT as "simplified" as you claim. But let's take on books,shall we? And I'm talking now about "pop culture";not any "highbrow" stuff. "CANDY",which isn't exactly great lit,used better language than what is sloughed off on today's populace as "great" modern works of literature.
And if you go back a bit farther,just look at the brilliant use of English in "THE WOMEN";even the movie.
More seriously, though, yours is -- in my humble view -- an excellent commentary, **particularly** the part about public (alleged) schools.
Well said, and FReegards!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.