THIS!!
Readers’ notions of what is correct is formed by reading people whose notion of what is correct is formed by reading people whose notion … all the way down to people who know no better or - even worse - simply do not care.
@Mindysan - at the risk of putting words in @Frederic’s mouth, I think the above is most likely more what was being referred to rather than who is a “less interesting writer” or “high quality writer”. The examples given (then/than, should’ve/should of, etc.) are clearly ‘informal internet writing’ where errors compound and propagate.
My teenage daughter was surprised to learn the pronunciation of ‘Prague’, which she had often read but never heard until today. She wondered why it does it not rhyme with ‘vague’ , ‘plague’, ‘ague’ or ‘Montague’…
I guess in that case, it’s the name of a foreign city, so the convention would follow Czech pronunciations? But then again, I’ve apparently been saying the name of the capital of Ukraine incorrectly for all my life, as I’ve always said Key-Ev, but it should be said Keev. I have no clue if that’s true for Prague, though. I’m not sure I’ve heard someone from the Czech republic say the word.
True, but Americans tend (tend…) to articulate every syllable and hit every consonant (Worcester [wooooster] to most Americans is pronounced "Wore-Sest-Errr). I do it to, even though I’m from Massachusetts, can pronounce Worcester, and, as an aside, manage to mangle most words with “r’s”.
I think we can thank Noah Webster and his early pronunciation keys for our tendency to speak a bit slower, a bit more syllabic, and somewhat uniform, compared to other English speakers. I do think I will get quite a bit of pushback though.
English really is ridiculous when you look closely. I was working to develop a way to demonstrate and teach the concepts of prepositions to non-verbal middle-schoolers with autism. (This was not my idea of a good use of time, but I was/am not the boss) It was kind of hopeless. You get on and off the bus, but in and out of the car. You put gloves on or take them off, but your hand is in the glove or out of the glove.
We were also supposed to teach concepts like ‘over’ ‘next to’ and ‘under’ using a 2D drawing of a tree and paper 2d apples. This was so fscked up because the direction, ‘put the apple over the tree’ has two correct interpretations, depending on how literally you interpret the direction. Or, “Put the apple under the tree” is the same problem. If the student put the paper apple underneath the paper tree, that’s correct but considered wrong according to my boss. If you put the paper apple next to the bottom of the tree trunk, that is the ‘correct’ answer. OK, fine, but then how do you teach “next to” if it’s also ‘under?’ English is ridiculous.
Sixty years 1960-2020. Looks like it has doubled in that period, at the very least. But I don’t know if that chart indicates books first published in that year or books in print that year, or something else.
Prepositions are weird and essentially random in every Indo-European language.
Your examples would work exactly the same in German and any other language I can speak (or understand somewhat at least).
The tree one is especially interesting, even just in 3D space. We’re not used to seeing trees floating free, with their roots exposed, so it seems our frame of reference is actually the canopy of the tree. If you had a tree that had been stripped of its branches and was only a trunk, you wouldn’t say “put it under the tree”, you’d say “next to the tree”. Fascinating stuff but, as I said, not unique to English.
The original version of that quote is by James Nicoll and is “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whre. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." Well, with the typo of “riffle” corrected to “rifle”, and with "whre” censored for the suitabilities of this board. It was posted to Usenet with message-id <1990May15.155309.8892watdragon.waterloo.edu> .
A house is indeed built on its foundation. But a cantilevered deck might be built off of the second story. Consider the venerable word “offshoot”. “Off of” is a perfectly reasonable way to add nuance when describing something that is influenced by or attached to something, but not in the fully direct and straightforward way that “on” would imply.
From 55 to the present it went down by a third. I suspect it just goes in cycles as something copy editors take more or less seriously and the use of “should’ve” at all makes the error more or less inevitable and reflects absolutely no change in real skill at writing.
I think that is more of a distinction without a difference. Any new usage will be supported by some and decried as an abuse by others. After some indeterminate period of time, it will either be largely abandoned, or become a generally accepted part of the language. The trick for any particular usage is determining whether it’s still in the thesis/antithesis stage (in which valid objections are still worthwhile), or whether we’ve moved on to synthesis (at which point any objections are just shouting at the bins).
That is probably the best reason for resisting a change, but even then you’ve got to pick your battles. The war for “disinterested” still goes on, but the war for “meticulous” was probably already lost when Ernest Gowers was moaning about it in The Complete Plain Words back in the 1950s.
