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Pooh-Bah
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"Many years ago I showed a silverware pattern I admired to a friend" has another clear meaning
Let's say my hobby is colleting silverware. I participate in an annual show in which I display my collection, especially some sets having interesting patterns. Looking back, I recall one such show in which I had entered a pattern which I myself had not considered unique
The reason I did so that was that earlier during a visit to my home by a dear friend also interested in my hobby, I had showed it to him, telling him that in spite of its plain pattern I nevertheless admired it for some of its other qualities; whereupon he remarked, "But you're wrong about that, it has one of the most interesting patterns I have ever seen"
Over the next few days as I ruminated upon his comment, I began to agree, and so I determined to enter it in the very next show
I will readily agree with the prescriptivist who will immediately object, "To have that exact meaning you would have had to say, "...I had admired..."
Many pre-'s are like that, they find a fault and they drag you through the mud. Still, I woud wager that if the pertinent sentence had been spoken by one silverware collector to another, the wrong meaning might well have been inferred
The phenom I describe is very common and is responsible for misunderstandings arising in Internet boards such as this one, causing much friction and unnecessary squabbling; eg, another tempest in a teapot. Such disputes are sometimes so virulent as to cause the most savage conflict
Nonetheless upon first reading, the unintended meaning was the one which first impressed itself upon me. I have encounterd hundreds if not tens of thousands of such cases, which meaning could becalled ambiguous in spite of the pre-'s immediate reaction
Am I alone
Note to Admin: I submitted this in Weekly Themes because it was pertinent to the foregoing thread. However, if you judge it out of place please feel free to move it elsewhere, eg, Misc--Thanks--dalehileman
Last edited by dalehileman; 12/18/2006 4:01 PM.
dalehileman
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I would only say "... I had admired ..." if somewhere along the line I had stopped admiring it.
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Dale, I wish I could give some sensible answer to this, but these little puzzling grammar things are exactly those I am trying to learn more about on this board. I do like the saying though: 'Tempest in a teapot'. New to me.
Parallel saying in my foreign language is 'Storm in a glass of water'.
I like the English saying better : more fun.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: "I had admired" places the admiring before the show and at the same time clarifies the idea that it was the friend to whom the admiration had been expressed
Bran: Your follwup much appreciated, as God knows I can use from time to time a bit of encouragement
Last edited by dalehileman; 12/16/2006 4:08 PM.
dalehileman
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Pooh-Bah
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The pre- will be interested to learn that on another board that I'm not sure protocol permits me to name, two or three additional interpretations of the sentence have been uncovered, the most interesting of which shows that in spite of your first, second, or even fourth understanding, it can be thought to mean that I at no time actually showed him the silverware
dalehileman
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stranger
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dalehileman, what does "pre-'s" mean? (I'm new to the forum, so I don't have many clues......) Thanks,
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> pre- abbreviationesce for prescriptivist. (cross-threading)  welcome, redryder! or is that re-dryder? 
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Well, it's dale's own special way of denoting prescriptivist.
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Pooh-Bah
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dalehileman
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Saves keystrokes
You could've saved sixteen keystrokes ...
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Pooh-Bah
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red: A pre- is one who lays it out like he thinks it ought to be; which a de- tells it like it is
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re: red: A pre- is one who lays it out like he thinks it ought to be; which a de- tells it like it is
that is according to Dale.
his use of Pre- and De- to have these specific meanings is his 'invention' (convention?)i don't know of it being used anywhere but here.
it's a DALE thing.
stay around and you'll learn other dale things. and when dale is uncertain, he claims to check with laverne, since she is smarter than he is. (but apparently laverne has no interest in being here.. i guess she is happy when dale is here, cause then, he not bothering her)
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Red--look for a PM from me.
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A prescriptivist believes that, if it works in practice but not in theory, something is wrong with the practice.
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speaking of The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, here's some more pre- vs. de-note the "name-calling" and teaching comments.
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Pooh-Bah
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Helen: My goodness, as Rummy might say, why such virulent reaction to a little persiflage
dalehileman
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What I get from that introduction equates descriptivists with apologists for the semi-literate and the stupid and lazy. The last aspect is usually about being too lazy to reach for a dictionary. But wait! Reaching for a dictionary is not good enough anymore since the apologists have seen fit to legitimize every idiotic word that can be invented. So diction by popular demand rather than by actual intelligence is the order of the day. With the lunatics running the asylum, humans can devolve into Fahrenheit 451 bus riders at an accelerated rate. What should be most embarrassing to the apologists is the knee-jerk thought processes that create verbal junk like the example “irregardless”. Obviously in this case some dim bulb (or several) decided that since there is an ‘irrespective’ there must also be an ‘irregardless’. And in the Age of Ignorance such a thing spreads like wildfire by the monkey-hear, monkey-say principle. So why not have a group of babbling four-year-olds edit the dictionary? Stupidity is all the rage now. 
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Pooh-Bah
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Aramis: Well put! When I was a pre- I would have agreed with you in every possible way. It would appear that each and every vulgar usage eventually finds itself into Merriam Collegiate until eventually any word can come to have any meaning you wish it to
eg, by 2098 "Drive the drive to drive my drive and blue drive" will mean, "Please label the DVD on which you wish to record my singing, then transcribe this music to the blue semiconductor chip hanging by my keychain"
However I have learned in the meantime that resistance is futile, that one might as well join the de-‘s, simply lie on his stomach and spread his cheeks...
However, for what it’s worth (which evidently isn’t very much), an otherwise valuable parting thought: When faced with a new concept in search of a label, instead of applying a divergent new meaning to an old word, I highly recommend instead the coining of a brand-new one
dalehileman
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Pooh-Bah
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PS: I apologize for somehow ensconcing this thread in Weekly. I would transfer it en masse to Misc but I don't know how
dalehileman
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Quote:
What I get from that introduction equates descriptivists with apologists for the semi-literate and the stupid and lazy. The last aspect is usually about being too lazy to reach for a dictionary. But wait! Reaching for a dictionary is not good enough anymore since the apologists have seen fit to legitimize every idiotic word that can be invented. So diction by popular demand rather than by actual intelligence is the order of the day. With the lunatics running the asylum, humans can devolve into Fahrenheit 451 bus riders at an accelerated rate. What should be most embarrassing to the apologists is the knee-jerk thought processes that create verbal junk like the example “irregardless”. Obviously in this case some dim bulb (or several) decided that since there is an ‘irrespective’ there must also be an ‘irregardless’. And in the Age of Ignorance such a thing spreads like wildfire by the monkey-hear, monkey-say principle. So why not have a group of babbling four-year-olds edit the dictionary? Stupidity is all the rage now.
Every word, every construction, every piece of syntax and grammar in that post was horribly incorrect at some point in the past. The language changes and we manage to understand and be understood.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Only partly true. Eg, you want to be careful how you use the neologism "gay"
dalehileman
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It was just a little holiday rant that would have been much more difficult to compose in ME. 
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Absolutely true in every respect. Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
Of course as a newly fledged de- I wouldn't; now I merely bend over and slide down my britches
dalehileman
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Quote:
Fal: Absolutely true in every respect. Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
Of course as a newly fledged de- I wouldn't; now I merely bend over and slide down my britches
Quote:
Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
I don't know why not. Isn't a drive a place where data is stored, whether hard, floppy, virtual, portable, solid-state, or whatever other adjective might be thrown at it?
While the technical definition of a drive is a device that spins disks or tapes in order to read and write data; for example, a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or tape drive, in reality we do not use the word that way. "Write it to the floppy drive." "Store it on the hard drive." We LONG ago (post-modernally speaking) stopped thinking of a drive as a motor that turns a disk or moves a tape.
TEd
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Quote:
While the technical definition of a drive is a device that spins disks or tapes in order to read and write data; for example, a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or tape drive, in reality we do not use the word that way. "Write it to the floppy drive." "Store it on the hard drive." We LONG ago (post-modernally speaking) stopped thinking of a drive as a motor that turns a disk or moves a tape.
Good point. However, I might write to a hard drive, where the medium and the mechanics are one unit, but in the case of a CD or, if you have an old enough machine, a floppy, you write to the dis(c,k) not the drive. But in the case of the USB thumb drive, we're back to the medium and the mechanics being a unit again. Certainly to the computer it looks the same as, say, a hard drive. This seems to be enough. There's also the tendency of terminology to be more conservative than the technology of which it speaks. Cf., dialing a touch tone phone.
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