|
|
Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 876
old hand
|
OP
old hand
Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 876 |
This is a true story. It happened to me. It's a prescriptivist's nightmare and a descriptivist's dream...
Teacher: I need to get more sleep. I'm mad tired.
Student: Miss, not to disrespect, but I hear all these people using "mad" wrong.
Teacher: Really? Like "mad tired"? I hear people say that a lot.
Student: Yeah, I know. But it be the wrong way to use it. It mean "a lot". You know, like "There was mad people in there."
Teacher: Oh, I see. Thanks!
;0)
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 5,295
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 5,295 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
You realise the student is being a prescriptivist here.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290 |
a prescriptivist's nightmare and a descriptivist's dream
Mad as used by the teacher in the dialogue does not mean a lot; it means very or way. Mad is a troublesome word. Many folks use it as a synonym for angry. This upsets some. I'm not sure that descriptive linguists dream of ESL/EFL classes and the kind of mistakes that student regularly make in them. (I know this from experience as I am currently taking Japanese lessons at work with some colleagues.) Descriptivists merely try to describe language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptivists try to control how people speak and write, often resorting to extra-linguistic rationalizations for why some common usage is "incorrect".
[Corrected mistaken identity.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 12/20/08 05:24 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 5,295
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 5,295 |
>-- Mad as used by the teacher in the dialogue does not mean a lot; it means very or way.You mean way tired? Is that not just as strange as mad tired ? - way used in the meaning of very? I know this from the expression "You're way out of line". ( have been often enough I'm sad to admit ) 
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
cool!
no, way cool!!
no, no; MAD cool!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290 |
"You're way out of line"
I doubt that even the most normative of grammarians would blink at this construction in normal conversation. I deliberately gave two examples of common intensifiers (very and way), common and more colloquial. I, personally find way less unusual as an intensifier than mad, which seems a British usage. Very and too are interesting in that they are commonly used in speech but deprecated in more formal registers, such as writing.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Descriptivists merely try to describe language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Descriptivists try to control how people speak and write, often resorting to extra-linguistic rationalizations for why some common usage is "incorrect". That second "[d]escriptivists" should be "[p]rescriptivists", yes?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290 |
That second "[d]escriptivists" should be "[p]rescriptivists"
Yes, I have corrected it. Thanks.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773 |
The new use for "Mad" reminds me of my contention we might sympathize with the prescriptivists' nightmare that eventually any word at all will come to mean anything you want it to
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 existencce depends upon the legalization of dredging a shallow river intended to convey logs downstream for further processing
Venue, incidentally, is another case in point
dalehileman
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,344
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
1 members (A C Bowden),
558
guests, and
1
robot. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
