A common lament (more like a rant), on-line and off-, is that linguistic change is corruption and leads to the imminent destruction of language and subsequent incommunication. To see what utter nonsense this is, one needs only to look so far as the history of language change in Europe. Latin started to change even before the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Who, amongst the linguo-Casandras, can cogently argue that Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, Provencal, etc., are worse than Latin or less capable of communication? French is as different a language from Latin as (Present-Day) English is from Old English, but what of it? Great literature exists in all four of those languages.

hear, hear.

Do you conclude from "language corruption doesn't necessarily produce poor communication" that "it doesn't ever produce poor communication?"

Do you conclude from "language corruption doesn't necessarily produce poor communication" that "it doesn't ever produce poor communication?"

No, I conclude that from the fact that I know of no language that, of itself, leads to bad or poor communication.There's another trend that historical linguists have noticed about language change. The language tends to keep changing to make it easier to speak and communicate. For example, the inflectional case system did not simply disappear from Old English and Latin, they were replaced by fixed word order (and, at this point, somebody usually mentions prepositions, but they were used in the case system, too). I'd say poor communication is possible in any language. I have never seen a language corrupt. What does it look and smell like?

So we should never judge one form superior to: another, a whole other, a whole nuther?

So we should never judge one form superior to: another, a whole other, a whole nuther?

While I did not use the terms superior or inferior, I did suggest the appropriate registers in which to use the term whole 'nother. Your question in the other thread, only discussed the appropriateness of the use whole 'nother, and I believe that is what I addressed: the context of its usage.

while I love J.S. Bach, the world would be a lesser place without John Coltrane, or Peter Gabriel.

Well, comparing modern English to the English of the 17th century, it has become a lot easier to read. I've just finished R.E. Pritchard's 'Odd Tom Coryate' , quote:

"The first noble carowsing that I saw in Germany was at mine Inne in Basil. Where I saw the Germanes drink helter-skelter very sociably, exempting my selfe from their liquid impositions as well as I could. It is their custome whensoever they drink to another, to see their glasses filled up incontinent{for therein they most commonly drinke } and then they deliver it into the hand of him to whom they drinke, esteeming him a very curteous man that doth pledge the whole, according to the old verse:

Germanus mihi frater eris si pocula siccas.{German, thou shalt be my brother if thou drainest the cup.}

But on the contrary side, they deeme that man for a very rusticall and unsociable peasant, utterly unworthy of their company, that will not with reciprocall turnes mutually retaliate a health. And they verifie the old speeche... eyther drink or be gon. For though they will not offer any villainie or injury unto him that refuseth to pledge him the whole
{ which I have often seene in England to my great griefe } yet they will so little regard him, that they will scarce vouchafe to converse with him."

It is fun to have the old(er) and the newer English both.

"I'd say poor communication is possible in any language."
Does anyone actually argue more than this?


"I have never seen a language corrupt. "

Does anyone argue this?

I haven't heard it call corruption here, but many people are always worrying about language going down the drain. What I find irritating is what we have:

Every ten years a new Wordlist Of The Dutch Language is published by the Dutch Language Union, known as 'The Green Booklet', edited by the Institute of Dutch Lexicology. Meaning spelling changes; not bad in itsself but annoying that from there on many words have been slightly changed to be allowed as correct. Remarkably, in the yearly TV spelling contest, The Belgians usually win from the Dutch.

Next thing you know they're going to start spelling iland with an S stuck in there somewhere, a napron will become an apron, and dout will get a B between the U and the T. As Nuncle Z points out, we've already lost the valuable art of having adjectives agree with their nouns in case and gender and lost all hint of case in nouns except for the genitive. It's a wonder anyone can understand a word anyone else says anymore.

spelling iland with an S stuck in there somewhere

"The only good linguistic change is one that happened before the peeved grammarian was in knee-pants and which contributes to the erratic and irrational nature of English orthography."

zm I'd amend your position by suggesting that when a new or novel gadget or concept appears that it's usually better to coin a new word than adapt an old one. By applying more and more meanings to an old word we dilute its meaning until ultimately anything one says can come to mean anything at all

Thus a drive drive drive drive is the flight of a ball in a baseball game, the outcome of which results in an automobile trip by the all-time home-run champion to a venue in which culturally-acquired concern for the proliferation of a keychain semiconductor memory is sponsored through the profits of a lumber mill whose continued existence depends upon the legalization of dredging a shallow river intended to convey logs downstream for further processing

Ya know dale, it's easy to find some process that you don't like and invent an example of that process doing something that makes no sense. Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo that translates out to something about wanting to be in an apple tree, but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive for something that doesn't have a bunch of wheels spinning around is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing sometimes known as a flash drive or a thumb drive looks exactly like a hard drive or a floppy drive or a tape drive in every sense but the literal. And nobody's going to be confused by using the word drive to talk about it.

"I have never seen a language corrupt. "

Does anyone argue this?

Language in itself is as innocent as the bullet in the gun.

i do not think that is a good analogy since the only purpose of a bullet is destructive. Even unfired(?) the bullet is waiting to cause harm.

Even unfired(?) the bullet is waiting to cause harm. And/or to save a life.

Language is as innocent as the one who uses it.

ya know, it's sad in a way that the floppy drive (and floppy disk) is going the way of the dodo bird. link it was fun to explain (with props) to a group of neophytes why a 3½-inch floppy disk was called floppy.
-joe (show & tell) friday

So, what didja say?

if'n you open up a 3½-inch floppy disk (or a 5¼, for that matter), and we did, you get to see the floppy magnetic recording material inside, and we did — and when you flap it, it even makes a floppy sound!
-joe (frappin') friday

I was sorry to see the death of the slow mainframe computer. One could go down to the computer room, look at the computer through the large, glass window, and gauge the sort of response time one would get when accessing it from the terminals up on the second floor.

And the golden age of digital display was the nixie tube. The anodes were aligned at varying depths when seen from the front and typically not arranged in numerical order. Thus the display of digits, when counting up, as may happen when displaying a changing voltage, would skitter back and forth in a seeming random manner. The tube, of course, is known in British English, which we all know is far superior to the degraded American English, as a valve, despite the fact that it is nothing at all like a folding door.

Good heavens--I certainly would never have equated (or come close to equating) a valve with "section of a folding or revolving door"! But the etymology sure clarifies the connection; thank you for posting that link.

I always thought that a 5 1/4 was a floppy, and a 3 1/2 was a "hard disk", but it's so long ago, my memory might be a bit floppy... ;0)

we're getting into debatable terminology again (though not so complex as linguistics!) -- the term 'floppy' carried over to the smaller (harder?) disk in same way that 'dial' carried over from one generation of telephone to the next. and a hard disk or drive is the big one inside your computer!

"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal

Inevitably the descriptivist defends each and every usage, on the basis of "well, that's just the way a language develops." But the World is full of war, crime, and suffering too. Is it all justified by saying that, well, that's just the way folks are

You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction

[--which I might have called a "keseram"...but thank you for "quotidian", a new one on me, I like it

Nope. A hard drive is one with hard disks of a recording medium inside a container of some sort. The device variously known as a thumb drive, a flash drive, or any number of other names is not called a hard drive. The 3-1/2 inch floppy was called a floppy not because it sorta looked like a 5-1/4 inch floppy but because the medium inside the hard case was the same, floppy medium as that in the 5-1/4 inch floppy that happened to be in a more floppy case. One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost. Such a feature would make a flash drive totally useless.

Does this exchange suggest that the verb dalehileman as defined in zmjezhd's link is now being used in both an intransitive and a transitive sense?

Fal sorry if I was not clear but my contention was that the wording of your reply seemed to suggest that if one accepts the term "drive" for the device then he might conceivably have accepted "hard drive" as equally applicable, which notion you now evidently reject

However, "One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost." is well taken as indeed I should not have called it a RAM, my bad. I had simply made the evidently mistaken assumption that surely the modern RAM might be available also in non-volatile form

RAM

For the record, a flash memory data storage device (aka USB flash drive, thumb drive, jump drive) does not use volatile RAM, but a kind of EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory). I agree with Faldo. A hard drive and a jump drive, while technically quite different devices for different purposes, are indistinguishable to the user, both being something you store data on. It little matters if there are imps in there reading and writing data on vellum MSS.

It's kind of like had arguing that a rugby football is a ball so therefore I must be arguing for the validity of calling it a baseball. It just ain't so.

zm thank you for that rundown, for confirming that the flash device isn't volatile. Fal forgive me once more for misreading but I still maintain it shouldn't be called a "drive"

re: overloading the term 'drive'

daleh, even the term 'overload' is overloaded.
as I've said elsewhere (and others have, too): context, context, context

-joe (underloaded) friday

Fine. As long as you understand what people mean when they use the term that way and you make yourself clear when referring to the devices in question.

And don't let me catch you using the word album to refer to a single CD or a single LP.

"And don't let me catch you using the word album to refer to a single CD or a single LP."

Coincidentally one of my pet peeves as a former prescriptivist