Language usage that annoys you

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Cainntear
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Cainntear » Sat Dec 17, 2016 1:15 pm

Serpent wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
Serpent wrote:I wasn't mocking it, I'm genuinely curious about its meaning.

A speakeasy was the name for a bar during the Prohibition era in the US -- i.e. when drinking alcohol was illegal.
:oops: should have looked it up.
Still fascinating how this word doesn't appear to bother Speakeasy, though.

Probably because it's very much recognisably a colloquialism. I personally can't read the word without hearing it in some corny Chicago gangster movie accent.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Speakeasy » Sat Dec 17, 2016 2:19 pm

Serpent wrote: A speakeasy ... should have looked it up. Still fascinating how this word doesn't appear to bother Speakeasy, though.
. The connotations of my Username (a place where one should speak softly so as to avoid the unwarranted interference by an over-bearing government) bother me no more than do those of yours:

Image

Cainntear wrote: ... A speakeasy ... I personally can't read the word without hearing it in some corny Chicago gangster movie accent.
A surprisingly elitist comment from a self-and-rather-loudly-proclaimed descriptivist!
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Querneus » Wed Dec 21, 2016 1:41 am

Alphathon wrote:Irregardless would also fit into this category but honestly I don't think I've ever come across it "in the wild", only in articles on/discussions of the misuse of English. Maybe it's mostly restricted to the US. Surprisingly double negatives don't bother me nearly as much (perhaps because they're mainly used dialectally rather than as "incorrect" standard English).
I used to believe this "irregardless" thing was just a meme that didn't actually exist in the wild, too, but oh boy, this past semester I had a professor who grew up in New York City and actually used "irregardless" all the time during lecture. And he didn't use it as some strengthened form of "regardless" as you'd suspect, but used it 100% of the time he had the choice... Nobody had the courage the point it out, and I wonder what he would've said.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby aokoye » Wed Dec 21, 2016 5:46 am

Speakeasy wrote:
Cainntear wrote: ... A speakeasy ... I personally can't read the word without hearing it in some corny Chicago gangster movie accent.
A surprisingly elitist comment from a self-and-rather-loudly-proclaimed descriptivist!
Image

Right - so people who are descriptivists can't admit that specific words make them think of specific situations. If anything it seemed like Cainntear was making a dig at themself. I'm actually not sure how you managed to weave the elitist bit in there either. As I said in another thread, I think some people on this forum need a refresher on what descriptivism and prescriptivism mean in the context of linguistics.

In short - people need to calm down.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby aokoye » Wed Dec 21, 2016 6:16 am

Serafín wrote:
Alphathon wrote:Irregardless would also fit into this category but honestly I don't think I've ever come across it "in the wild", only in articles on/discussions of the misuse of English. Maybe it's mostly restricted to the US. Surprisingly double negatives don't bother me nearly as much (perhaps because they're mainly used dialectally rather than as "incorrect" standard English).
I used to believe this "irregardless" thing was just a meme that didn't actually exist in the wild, too, but oh boy, this past semester I had a professor who grew up in New York City and actually used "irregardless" all the time during lecture. And he didn't use it as some strengthened form of "regardless" as you'd suspect, but used it 100% of the time he had the choice... Nobody had the courage the point it out, and I wonder what he would've said.


Yeah I used to say irregardless all the time and now I have to stop and think to make sure I'm saying regardless when I mean it. There are a few things like that, despite my descriptivist nature, will try to make sure I use "correctly". That whole being afraid people will judge me negatively for saying irregardless thing...
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Chung » Wed Dec 21, 2016 7:10 am

aokoye wrote:
Serafín wrote:
Alphathon wrote:Irregardless would also fit into this category but honestly I don't think I've ever come across it "in the wild", only in articles on/discussions of the misuse of English. Maybe it's mostly restricted to the US. Surprisingly double negatives don't bother me nearly as much (perhaps because they're mainly used dialectally rather than as "incorrect" standard English).
I used to believe this "irregardless" thing was just a meme that didn't actually exist in the wild, too, but oh boy, this past semester I had a professor who grew up in New York City and actually used "irregardless" all the time during lecture. And he didn't use it as some strengthened form of "regardless" as you'd suspect, but used it 100% of the time he had the choice... Nobody had the courage the point it out, and I wonder what he would've said.


Yeah I used to say irregardless all the time and now I have to stop and think to make sure I'm saying regardless when I mean it. There are a few things like that, despite my descriptivist nature, will try to make sure I use "correctly". That whole being afraid people will judge me negatively for saying irregardless thing...


I fail to see why descriptivists, self-proclaimed or otherwise, feel the need to be apologetic for anything that can be construed or viewed as prescriptivist when appealing to correctness (or qualifying their behavior or assertion by putting the term in quotation marks when expressed visually). I have no problem with regarding myself as a descriptivist with some prescriptivism. The fact that I'm spelling things in this post in a certain way reflects prescriptivism. Oh, the horror that I'm not trying to rock the boat!

I still stand by what I posted in this thread, especially the following in response to Solfrid Cristin.

On Nov. 19, 2013 in “Common errors vs language evolution”, Chung wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:Can I ask those of you who seem to think that everything is equal, nothing is better than anything else how you deal with mistakes made by children or foreigners? Are they also just as good as everything else?

In Norwegian we have the sound like in German "ich" only to make things harder, we also use it at the beginning of words. This is hard for children, and when left uncorrected we can see people in their twenties who still cannot say it correctly. We also see that many foreigners struggle with both that sound and the word order, and with the pronunciation of some vowels. Is the idea to just leave this uncorrected and consider it as just as good as the normal language?


In a world of public education and standard languages, the matter becomes one where it's worthwhile to use language in a way that will not only minimize misunderstandings to rational members of the speech community, but also reduce the chances of negative sociolinguistic judgements.

Even though I consider myself a staunch descriptivist, this doesn't mean that I succumb to a logical fallacy whereby I am to allow all variations even when they're still intelligible to me no matter that they diverge from the standard language which I know is a sort of lowest common linguistic denominator in the speech community.

Some things are obvious points for me to correct or put into ways consistent with the standards such as "Their coming tonight." (rather than "They're coming tonight.") or "They don't know nothing." (rather than "They don't know anything.").

Other points are fuzzier such as "Costs are increasing every day" versus "Costs are rising every day" (I've read somewhere that 'to increase' is a transitive verb only and so cannot be used without a direct object) or "hopefully," versus "I hope, that..." ("hopefully,.." is a disputed participal modifier but seems to be used on the model of "fortunately,...", "apparently,..." etc. which seem less disputed, if at all).

In cases where they're fuzzy, I might correct them in a way so that they resemble what I would use but the descriptivist in me tempts me to add commentary to someone requesting feedback. In this way I can illustrate that there are elements that are not always perceived as ungrammatical or non-standard by native speakers, and so the other person shouldn't dwell on them.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby William Camden » Wed Dec 21, 2016 7:30 am

I dislike the use of like in sentences like "I was like walking down the street..." I believe it started out as a colloquialism of American young people and spread to the rest of the Anglophone world.
The word order "I was walking down the street, like" is characteristic of Cockney or other types of London colloquial speech, but doesn't grind my gears so much as the other example.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Cainntear » Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:31 am

Speakeasy wrote:
Cainntear wrote: ... A speakeasy ... I personally can't read the word without hearing it in some corny Chicago gangster movie accent.
A surprisingly elitist comment from a self-and-rather-loudly-proclaimed descriptivist!

Elitist? How so? In the UK, the word "speakeasy" is usually only seen in one context... corny Chicago gangster movies.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby leosmith » Wed Dec 28, 2016 7:01 pm

literally

As in "we literally got our asses handed to us". No, that would be figuratively I hope.
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Re: Language usage that annoys you

Postby Ezy Ryder » Wed Dec 28, 2016 7:48 pm

People who insist "I believe you meant to say 'figuratively'", whenever they encounter the word "literally" used as an intensifier ;)
I think most people would use the word "figuratively" in such contexts predominantly in a mocking way. Just because it could fit in some (if not most of the) cases, it doesn't necessarily mean that's what the speaker meant.
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