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old hand
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old hand
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A real example He gots no (whatever)? I don't know the history of gots. I don't either, but I've seen it develop more or less spontaneously in young children, and it makes sense: got is perceived as the infinitive of a verb that approximates the meaning of have: "Got a minute?" the song "I Got Rhythm" is not past tense, as in "Yesterday I got rhythm," but present, as in "I have rhythm," so the conjugation runs I got, you got, he or she gots…Peter
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I agree Peter...I hear kids use 'gots' a lot and I guess they unlearn the use of it as they grow up, because us adults tell them its not correct.
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stranger
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stranger
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My old German professor would spit on the floor when he said a French word and then mutter "Bastard Latin!"
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
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My old German professor would spit on the floor when he said a French word and then mutter "Bastard Latin!"
Lovely habit spitting on floors. I'm glad I left the barnyard behind when I got to university. Anyway, French is neither worse nor better than Latin or German.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jun 2008
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If only they'd get rid of the filthy habit in Baseball.
Decades ago I taught both Latin and French, loved them both.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Lovely habit spitting on floors.
I forget where I read it but it was an account of an English ship's captain in Japan back when Japan started letting gaijin back in after a hundred years or so of forbidding them from entering. He said that he was amazed how clean the Japanese kept their houses. They were so clean that he almost didn't feel like spitting on the floor.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
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gaijin
NOUN:
pl. gaijin
A non-Japanese person.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ETYMOLOGY:
Japanese : gai, outside, foreign (from Middle Chinese wajh) + jin, person ; see jinriksha
AHD. Thank you.
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Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
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gaijin
I was actively studying Japanese at my last job (for a Japanese telecom company), and so, I would try to practice with the owner and Japanese-speaking customers at my local sushi restaurant. One day, I was asking the owner if some guest who had come in and were sitting in one of the tatami dining rooms were Japanese (nihonjin) or not. That led to my in a sentence referring to myself as a gaijin. My host corrected me. He said technically, since we were in the States, he was the gaijin (foreigner) and I was an amerikajin (American). It sounded too formal to me, so we settled on henna hakujin (weird white guy). The five days I spent in Japan I heard the word gaijin more than any other word.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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weird white guy [snort]
I heard the word gaijin more than any other word. Ah, yes--closely related to gringo, I believe!
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Nov 2011
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I really do dislike the idea that our "language is changing fo the worse."
Language changes. Sometimes it brings in "dross": more often it brings in "gold."
We have to live with it, innit?
I'm immortal until proven otherwise
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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I really do dislike the idea that our "language is changing fo the worse."
Language changes. Sometimes it brings in "dross": more often it brings in "gold."
We have to live with it, innit? I can't believe that Geoff Nunberg was serious when he said the language was changing for the worse. It can only have been irony.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Okay, I'll run the risk of copyright violation (shh, don't tell anybody) and try and put enough direct quotes in for you to get a better idea of what he said. Or, you could just look in the book on pp. 154-6.
At any time in the past four hundred years you could claim that the language was falling apart...
And to tell the truth, I have the same impression myself. I look around me and the signs seem unmistakable that the language is in a bad way. ...
But are things really worse than they used to be? Maybe it's just that I'm getting old and cranky. The fact is, complaining about English usage has always been an old man's game. ...
It would be a hard point to prove one way or the other. By context, I infer that by "it" in this sentence he means language worsening, not whether complaining is an old man's game. Then he goes into talking about how many more people are writing these days and how more widespread their writing is than used to be possible.
The number of people who sit down at a keyboard every day has probably increased tenfold over the past few years--quite a few of them people whose writing used to be seen only on their refrigerator doors. They're people who were never able spell very well, but over the telephone you couldn't tell. HTH. And, I admit to creating a subject topic line that I hoped had a "hook".
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member
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From the quote Jackie gives, I get the impression that Nunberg is setting up the argument in order to disprove it. On the other hand he seems to have a prescriptivist streak; he wrote this: It may be that my children will use gift and impact as verbs without the slightest compunction (just as I use contact, wondering that anyone ever bothered to object to it). But I can't overcome the feeling that it is wrong for me to use them in that way and that people of my generation who say "We decided to gift them with a desk set" are in some sense guilty of a moral lapse, whether because they are ignorant or because they are weak. In the face of that conviction, it really doesn't matter to me whether to gift will eventually prevail, carried on the historical tide. Our glory, Silone said, lies in not having to submit to history.
Last edited by goofy; 11/19/2011 5:04 PM.
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