Is English Deteriorating ?

Artful Dilettante/Harvey A. Daniels ^ | March 6, 2018 | Artful Dilettante

[cornfedcowboy]

Do your best to redouble your effort again irregardless of what you might think is correct.

[sparklite2]

In a similar vein, enormity does not mean simply big.

[A strike]

DUUD’’/ are yu lik from the future or somthing ?

[A strike]

I redouble sometimes”, though never irregardlesslee.

[Vendome]

Dunno...is it?

[sparklite2]

I can see why ‘unpack’ replaces ‘analyse.’
Unpacking a box and looking at its contents
is a thought less off-putting than having
to critically dissect something with rules
and, often, an agenda.

[TChris]

In a word, yes.

I blame the dictionaries for legitimizing bad English when it's (mis)used often enough. (The verb-ing of every noun in the language is way out of hand...)

If might makes right, then why have a dictionary at all?

[TChris]

Well, let’s analyze, um, I mean, “unpack” that.

I regularly hear "parse" in this context too, as if a conversation were a computer program. *sigh*

[dsc]

“I get a chuckle out of grammar/spelling nazis correcting a typo someone made”

Legitimate grammar and spelling Nazis do not stoop to correct typos.

[TEXOKIE]

If you don’t put a comma after eat, there is a horrifying scenario about to take place:

LET’S EAT GRANDMA!!!!

In the following, you are about to be assaulted by a hairy armed misshapen monster:

I’LL KILL YOU WITH MY BEAR HANDS!!

for others:

https://www.pinterest.com/shirleytingle/funny-andor-tragic-spelling-grammar-and-punctuatio/

[Windflier]

...grammatical errors I see and hear everyday...

Sorry, it should read, "...grammatical errors I see and hear every day..."

Everyday; ordinary, or commonplace.

Every day; each day, inclusively.

[preacher]

L8r

[firebrand]

“different than” is also wrong, by the way.

[firebrand]

But proofreaders mark it wf, in either case.

[Windflier]

...people neglecting to add an “s” to words ending in “ist” when they’re plural.

I blame computers for that one. I can't tell you how many times I've caught my computer dropping the s from the end of a word ending in 'ist'.

[Windflier]

"My house needs painted."

That one makes my skin crawl.

A more recent pet peeve, is when posters militantly refuse to capitalize the first letter of every sentence. I find it so annoying that I've begun scrolling past such posts.

[cynwoody]

That kind of marshal has only one l.

https://www.usmarshals.gov/

[cynwoody]

“Gift” used as a verb.

That's perfectly OK. It distinguishes the act of transferring without compensation from the act of simply transferring. Thus, it should be used if making that distinction matters.

[Political Junkie Too]

English has been in decline since the Normans took over.

Some things are just too difficult to coordinate.

-PJ

[cynwoody]

As a professional graphic artist and typesetter in the 1970s and early '80s, I see that everyone now uses the word "font," as seen on computers, when the correct word is "typeface." A font like italics is a derivative, or subset, of a typeface like Courier.

That's backwards. "Font" is the general term. A "typeface" is a specific instance of a font, such as Courier at a specific size, say 16pt, a specific style, say italic, a specific weight, say bold. The font definition will contain rules for how to shape the characters, given such parameters. A font is what you select, the typeface is what you see, given all your settings applied together.

That's why you download, install, and select fonts, not typefaces. That's why there are websites like Identifont.

Text presentation is a complex topic. And that's without getting into issues such as character spacing, character direction, line spacing, paragraph justification, etc.

We've come a long way since typesetting on Linotype.