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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290 |
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."
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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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
dalehileman
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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.
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old hand
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old hand
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"I have never seen a language corrupt. "
Does anyone argue this?
Language in itself is as innocent as the bullet in the gun.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Nov 2007
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"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.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Even unfired(?) the bullet is waiting to cause harm. And/or to save a life.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Language is as innocent as the one who uses it.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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. 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
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