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Carpal Tunnel
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The professor's reasoning was that the Latin infinitive was a single word, not two as are English infinitives.
WW, you learned right. It was one of those Victorian thangs. I'll let my betters, tsuwm, Faldage and maverick (and who knows who-all else?), direct you to the right place but I think you'll find this in Pinkerton's The Language Instinct, which somebody cited somewhere in some forum (I'm getting too old to be participating in four bulletin boards... I can never remember who did what to whom).
And then again, you could always consult William Safire.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Smart courtiers do not correct the King. That's why we call London's river the Tems.
I alwaays wondered why, Dr Bill. Can you substantiate and attribute? One of those Hanover guys?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear AS: my face is red. I remember reading that because the first Hanoverian,
George I spoke no English, he pronounced name of river auf Deutsch. and sycophant
courtiers adopted his pronunciation. But AHD says the "h" in the name was
introduced by spurious scholarship, and pronunciation therefore aways was "Tems".
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Carpal Tunnel
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Ignorance can be cured, stupidity goes all the way to the bone.
Dwight David Eisenhower. James Earl Carter.
Ignorant or stupid?
This is a sample of natural linguistic change. It's OK if it was done a couple hundred years ago but heaven forfend that it happen right before your eyes. No problem using the accusative/dative plural in the singular nominative in the second person as long as the ungrammatical usage was established as "correct" 400 hundred years ago but not today in the third person. It's OK to pronounce knight as though it were spelled nite but not nuclear as though it were spelled nucular.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Y'all prescriptivists ain' got no respeck for the language. It's fine as long as it does what you want it to do, but you can't take it on its own terms.
Harrumph®!
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addict
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addict
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duck tape duct tape Ducks very rarely need taping though you may not know that ducts always do—to keep air from escaping through the cracks in them. , i have always called this gaffer tape or duck tape, the main brand name for gaffer tape in England
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old hand
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old hand
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: Y'all prescriptivists ain' got no respeck for the language.
And I've said it before and will say it again: we're all prescriptivists, even you. It's just a matter of degree. One simply needs to be prepared to admit that one has one's own set of prescriptivists taboos.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Prescriptivists are indeed condemned to piss against the tide. But patient teaching
of what is beautiful and what is ugly in language use ought slacken the tide a bit.
We can't lick the slobs, but we don't have to join them. Like, whatever.
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Carpal Tunnel
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One simply needs to be prepared to admit that one has one's own set of prescriptivists taboos.
Not if yer already prepared to laugh at the admition before actually® 'doing so'.
Would you (have me) believe that the least prescriptive of *us approaches the ununderstandable?
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old hand
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old hand
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In reply to:
Not if yer already prepared to laugh at the admition before actually® 'doing so'.
Would you (have me) believe that the least prescriptive of *us approaches the ununderstandable?
You, sir, are one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.
RIP DNA
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Carpal Tunnel
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we're all prescriptivists, even you
As we are all descriptivists. If we work on that assumption we strip all meaning from the words and communication is destroyed more surely than can be done with a few like, y'knows.
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