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Stupid English Project
If anyone feels particularly nice and has 5 perfectly good minutes to waste, you could be enormously helpful if you just filled out this stupid survey for my English project. I promise it won't take more than 5 minutes.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=p87-JMQw0ipPih9ERrTb_GQ
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=p87-JMQw0ipPih9ERrTb_GQ
done good luck
tj
tj
Thanks!
Aye, done.
Thanke!
Technically, at least on MY survey, "Sick" is not the same as "Sic".
I've always known it as "Sic em, fang!" instead of "sick", but apparently both are in use - if online dictionaries are to be trusted.
there you go
Done
Thank you very much to everyone who helped out with this! I now actually have a decent number of data points within the 30-60 age range to work with.
Exactly, Leber & Whytee, but the OED disagrees. The purpose of this survey was to prove some of the OED's obsolescences.
Done it. 15 yo
The purpose of this survey was to prove some of the OED's obsolescences.
Certain under-educated mouth breathers possess limited vocabularies . . . and you blame the OED? Simply stunning.
Certain under-educated mouth breathers possess limited vocabularies . . . and you blame the OED? Simply stunning.
I think the study was actually ON the Oxford English Dictionary, Doc.
They probably all got one word out of it and compared the "man on the street" usage to the stuffy OED to get a good idea of the real "stuffiness factor" of the book.
Languages evolve, and it's the responsibility of any dictionary publisher to just DOCUMENT usage, NOT hold the line on "proper usage."
They probably all got one word out of it and compared the "man on the street" usage to the stuffy OED to get a good idea of the real "stuffiness factor" of the book.
Languages evolve, and it's the responsibility of any dictionary publisher to just DOCUMENT usage, NOT hold the line on "proper usage."
If you are reading something written long ago that makes use of a presently obsolete definition, you might want to look it up in order to capture the writer's full meaning. In that case the OED is quite handy as-is.
When I was a child I inherited a number of British children's stories from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Some of them were a tough read for a child in the USA 70-80 years after they were written. I was so glad I had one of those gargantuan unabridged dictionaries to help me out with some of the archaic (or uniquely British) terms and usages.
When I was a child I inherited a number of British children's stories from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Some of them were a tough read for a child in the USA 70-80 years after they were written. I was so glad I had one of those gargantuan unabridged dictionaries to help me out with some of the archaic (or uniquely British) terms and usages.
No, Leber, languages degenerate. And the responsibility of any dictionary publisher that I (or my educationally directed tax dollars) will support is to accurately sift correct usage from the vast morass of the common tongue.
If hoi polloi wish to "evolve" the language beyond that, they surely don't need a dictionary to embrace their slang.
If hoi polloi wish to "evolve" the language beyond that, they surely don't need a dictionary to embrace their slang.
Time for Mr. "But 'Irregardless' is a word!" to chime in.
New words are often a necessity, nouns and verbs in particular. As new concepts are formulated and new actions are preformed, they need to be described so they can be communicated to other people. While it is possible to keep using descriptions in place of new words, once that "something new" has been used to discover something new, you wind up using descriptions in your descriptions so you can define while you define. As an example, "The device for lightwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation progressively reads the alternating sequence of variable width black and white stripes" can also be communicated as "The laser scans the bar code". The meaning is the same, but a few new words and phrases allow us to save a great deal of time. New words will continue to be necessary so long as new discoveries continue to be made and added to the general body of human knowledge. That is how language evolves.
Now, that said, there are also words that are completely pointless, as there is already an existing word with the exact same meaning. Cool, fab, groovy, neat, awesome, hot, sizzling, and what I'm sure is a long list of even more obscure words all have one identical meaning. They could stand to have that meaning condensed down to just one word, especially considering that by other definitions of those words, they actually define exact opposites (hot and cool). That is how language degenerates.
The problem is that in this case, it was individual discoveries of a concept that led to new words being formulated, or a new meaning added to old words. The concept had been defined at a prior point, but since the person in question didn't know of the existence of the word that already held the definition they wanted, they created a new word. This is the language degeneracy that Lecter's describing. It happens in generations, just as humanity has generations. Fortunately, this phenomena tends to limit itself to the same rediscovered concepts, but that's little solace to the people who find themselves faced with a confusing array of new words in a language they thought they understood.
This is probably why most science has fallen back to Latin as the second language of choice (first choice is mathematics). Compared to modern English, it has an elegant simplicity where every word has one definition, independent of contextual changes of meaning. This enables a definition in Latin to remain unchanged by the trends that grip commonly spoken languages. It's rather ironic that this beautiful system of use is only possible because it's dead. Were Latin still used as a language of the masses, it too would be subject to degeneration of meaning. After all, Latin was once the language of the masses for all of Europe, and just look at what they did to it.
I, for one, can't wait for telepathy to be invented.
New words are often a necessity, nouns and verbs in particular. As new concepts are formulated and new actions are preformed, they need to be described so they can be communicated to other people. While it is possible to keep using descriptions in place of new words, once that "something new" has been used to discover something new, you wind up using descriptions in your descriptions so you can define while you define. As an example, "The device for lightwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation progressively reads the alternating sequence of variable width black and white stripes" can also be communicated as "The laser scans the bar code". The meaning is the same, but a few new words and phrases allow us to save a great deal of time. New words will continue to be necessary so long as new discoveries continue to be made and added to the general body of human knowledge. That is how language evolves.
Now, that said, there are also words that are completely pointless, as there is already an existing word with the exact same meaning. Cool, fab, groovy, neat, awesome, hot, sizzling, and what I'm sure is a long list of even more obscure words all have one identical meaning. They could stand to have that meaning condensed down to just one word, especially considering that by other definitions of those words, they actually define exact opposites (hot and cool). That is how language degenerates.
The problem is that in this case, it was individual discoveries of a concept that led to new words being formulated, or a new meaning added to old words. The concept had been defined at a prior point, but since the person in question didn't know of the existence of the word that already held the definition they wanted, they created a new word. This is the language degeneracy that Lecter's describing. It happens in generations, just as humanity has generations. Fortunately, this phenomena tends to limit itself to the same rediscovered concepts, but that's little solace to the people who find themselves faced with a confusing array of new words in a language they thought they understood.
This is probably why most science has fallen back to Latin as the second language of choice (first choice is mathematics). Compared to modern English, it has an elegant simplicity where every word has one definition, independent of contextual changes of meaning. This enables a definition in Latin to remain unchanged by the trends that grip commonly spoken languages. It's rather ironic that this beautiful system of use is only possible because it's dead. Were Latin still used as a language of the masses, it too would be subject to degeneration of meaning. After all, Latin was once the language of the masses for all of Europe, and just look at what they did to it.
I, for one, can't wait for telepathy to be invented.
You're trying to describe the difference between denotation and connotation, what words really mean and the way ordinary people use them as slang.
I have mixed feelings about this, as I see use of slang words like "cool" to be very useful and efficient when two people are casually talking to each other, but sometimes words stray too far and drive me nuts. Words like "ain't" and "irregardless." It also drives me nuts to hear people who get all upset when someone uses "swear words" that in context have literally no meaning at all and only serve to add intensity to a statement, but then that same offended person uses words like "heck", "gosh", "flip", "dang", etc., which serve identical functions as the words they replace, while remaining meaningless. Is it the words or their meanings that is offensive? I don't make a distinction between the words "shit" and "crap", because I think it's important to remember that words mean things, and can't just be thrown around like they're nothing. This is a big problem I see with English speakers today, using words without understanding that word first.
You made an excellent point about Latin, though.
I have mixed feelings about this, as I see use of slang words like "cool" to be very useful and efficient when two people are casually talking to each other, but sometimes words stray too far and drive me nuts. Words like "ain't" and "irregardless." It also drives me nuts to hear people who get all upset when someone uses "swear words" that in context have literally no meaning at all and only serve to add intensity to a statement, but then that same offended person uses words like "heck", "gosh", "flip", "dang", etc., which serve identical functions as the words they replace, while remaining meaningless. Is it the words or their meanings that is offensive? I don't make a distinction between the words "shit" and "crap", because I think it's important to remember that words mean things, and can't just be thrown around like they're nothing. This is a big problem I see with English speakers today, using words without understanding that word first.
You made an excellent point about Latin, though.
...can't wait for telepathy to be invented.
aww, heck no. I ain't interested in what other folk are talking, much less what they be thanking.
aww, heck no. I ain't interested in what other folk are talking, much less what they be thanking.