5 ms·

I'll happily accept the miniscule additional risk of running JS so I can use the web comfortably...

jen729w 7y ago
I'll say this only because I found out the other week and it blew my mind. No other reason, and I swear I'll never do it again. It's 'minuscule'. With a u in the middle. Mental.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Yeah, just like king is "actually" spelled cyning.[1] The variant miniscule has been attested since 1871. Given that almost every word that's been in English for long enough has had multiple spelling variants, what does it mean to say that miniscule is wrong and minuscule is right? [1]: The earliest known use of the word king in an English sentence is "Se cyning sealde & gebocade Wullafe fif sulung landes.", according to the OED.
  - jen729w 7y ago
    Mmm I get your point, and I’m all-in on the evolution of language, but I’m not sure you picked a great example here. ‘Cyning’ is, by any measure, no longer in use. ‘Miniscule’ is mostly recognised as an error. The word is spelled ‘minuscule’. It really is.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      > I’m not sure you picked a great example here. Why, what's the difference? > ‘Miniscule’ is mostly recognised as an error. Recognized by whom? And, more importantly, what gives the people who claim to recognize it as such the authority to regulate language? > The word is spelled ‘minuscule’. It really is. Again, on what authority? I can find plenty of people who are okay spelling it "miniscule". On what grounds are the people who spell it the other way "more correct" ? By the way, apparently somebody looked at a corpus and found "the spelling miniscule now makes up around 52% of the total use of the word"[1]. I think actual corpus research is a lot more valid of a way to answer the question "what is English" than some teachers and style guide writers coming up with rules arbitrarily. Before you point out to me that the above citation includes the line "it hasn't yet become accepted as standard English and you should still treat it as an error to be avoided", I already know. Again, the writers of this blog post have no more authority to arbitrarily decide what is English than you or I do, and it's sad that they ignored their own quantitative research to attempt to do such a thing. [1]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/minuscule-or-miniscule https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/minuscule-or-mini...
      - diminoten 7y ago
        If you google "miniscule" it comes up "minuscule". That's enough for me! https://www.google.com/search?q=miniscule https://www.google.com/search?q=miniscule
        umanwizard 7y ago
        Right, and if you go to this website I just made, it says the opposite: https://umanwizard.com/grammar.html https://umanwizard.com/grammar.html Does whoever Google got to compile their dictionary have more authority than I do? If so, why?
        diminoten 7y ago
        Yes, because there's more of them than you, by many orders of magnitude.
        umanwizard 7y ago
        More of who than me? Google engineers? It's unclear what you mean. Anyway, if we're going by number of people, I posted above a link to a blog post by people who did corpus research and found that the spelling "miniscule" makes up 52% of uses of the word. And, obviously, any normal dictionary will contain it, even if Google's doesn't. (Dictionaries typically are in the business of documenting uses of language, not declaring them right or wrong). Any one you care to check will contain "miniscule", note that it is a widely-used variant of "minuscule", and probably mention that some people consider it "wrong", which of course is not to say that it is wrong. ------------ Edit: I don't think I am getting my point across very clearly, so I will restate it here. I am bothered by people policing language for three main reasons: (1) It is logically meaningless. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not a formalized set of rules from some authority. It is absolutely impossible to define what it means for a given use of language to be "correct" or "incorrect" beyond "what is used and understood by the community of language users". Claiming that a widely-used spelling variant is "wrong" makes no more sense than claiming that rock music is "wrong" because it diverges from blues and whatever else came before. Or saying that Japanese people celebrate Christmas "wrong" because it diverges from how Catholics celebrate it (which in turn diverges from how pre-Christian populations celebrated various solstice festivals). (2) It neuters the study of language, which is an extremely rich and interesting field. It'd be much more interesting to ask why the variant arose, from a scientific perspective. The best theory is that it is a combination of two factors: confusion with the word "miniature", and sound changes in English that have cause unstressed vowels to be pronounced indistinguishably (i.e., unless you are trying very hard to enunciate, there is no perceptible difference between an unstressed "i" sound and an unstressed "u" sound). Now we're getting into questions of etymology, phonology, psycho-linguistic issues like "what information about words in our lexicon do we carry in our brain", etc., all absolutely fascinating topics in their own right. Just saying "miniscule is wrong" obscures all of this. By the way, the case of "miniscule" is by no means unusual. There are absolutely loads of words that changed for reasons with no etymological justification. One example is island -- the "s" has no etymological justification, at all, and the current spelling gradually became more common than the earlier "iland" (and various other variants) between 1500 and 1700 by analogy with the probably unrelated Latin word insula. Words changing because of phonological perception effects is very common too: apron comes from an earlier "napron", because of "a napron" getting re-analyzed as "an apron". For those of us who are interested in the sorts of things that happened to apron and island centuries ago, it's cool to witness a similar phenomenon in progress today. (3) Language policing is very closely connected with classism and, in some countries (including the US), racism. I'm not accusing anyone in this thread of that, but it's a good reason to be sensitive about it.
- diminoten 7y ago
  Hah, I appreciate this note, TIL!

I'll say this only because I found out the other week and it blew my mind. No other reason, and I swear I'll never do it again. It's 'minuscule'. With a u in the middle. Mental.

umanwizard 7y ago
Yeah, just like king is "actually" spelled cyning.[1] The variant miniscule has been attested since 1871. Given that almost every word that's been in English for long enough has had multiple spelling variants, what does it mean to say that miniscule is wrong and minuscule is right? [1]: The earliest known use of the word king in an English sentence is "Se cyning sealde & gebocade Wullafe fif sulung landes.", according to the OED.
- jen729w 7y ago
  Mmm I get your point, and I’m all-in on the evolution of language, but I’m not sure you picked a great example here. ‘Cyning’ is, by any measure, no longer in use. ‘Miniscule’ is mostly recognised as an error. The word is spelled ‘minuscule’. It really is.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    > I’m not sure you picked a great example here. Why, what's the difference? > ‘Miniscule’ is mostly recognised as an error. Recognized by whom? And, more importantly, what gives the people who claim to recognize it as such the authority to regulate language? > The word is spelled ‘minuscule’. It really is. Again, on what authority? I can find plenty of people who are okay spelling it "miniscule". On what grounds are the people who spell it the other way "more correct" ? By the way, apparently somebody looked at a corpus and found "the spelling miniscule now makes up around 52% of the total use of the word"[1]. I think actual corpus research is a lot more valid of a way to answer the question "what is English" than some teachers and style guide writers coming up with rules arbitrarily. Before you point out to me that the above citation includes the line "it hasn't yet become accepted as standard English and you should still treat it as an error to be avoided", I already know. Again, the writers of this blog post have no more authority to arbitrarily decide what is English than you or I do, and it's sad that they ignored their own quantitative research to attempt to do such a thing. [1]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/minuscule-or-miniscule https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling/minuscule-or-mini...
    - diminoten 7y ago
      If you google "miniscule" it comes up "minuscule". That's enough for me! https://www.google.com/search?q=miniscule https://www.google.com/search?q=miniscule
      - umanwizard 7y ago
        Right, and if you go to this website I just made, it says the opposite: https://umanwizard.com/grammar.html https://umanwizard.com/grammar.html Does whoever Google got to compile their dictionary have more authority than I do? If so, why?
        diminoten 7y ago
        Yes, because there's more of them than you, by many orders of magnitude.
        umanwizard 7y ago
        More of who than me? Google engineers? It's unclear what you mean. Anyway, if we're going by number of people, I posted above a link to a blog post by people who did corpus research and found that the spelling "miniscule" makes up 52% of uses of the word. And, obviously, any normal dictionary will contain it, even if Google's doesn't. (Dictionaries typically are in the business of documenting uses of language, not declaring them right or wrong). Any one you care to check will contain "miniscule", note that it is a widely-used variant of "minuscule", and probably mention that some people consider it "wrong", which of course is not to say that it is wrong. ------------ Edit: I don't think I am getting my point across very clearly, so I will restate it here. I am bothered by people policing language for three main reasons: (1) It is logically meaningless. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not a formalized set of rules from some authority. It is absolutely impossible to define what it means for a given use of language to be "correct" or "incorrect" beyond "what is used and understood by the community of language users". Claiming that a widely-used spelling variant is "wrong" makes no more sense than claiming that rock music is "wrong" because it diverges from blues and whatever else came before. Or saying that Japanese people celebrate Christmas "wrong" because it diverges from how Catholics celebrate it (which in turn diverges from how pre-Christian populations celebrated various solstice festivals). (2) It neuters the study of language, which is an extremely rich and interesting field. It'd be much more interesting to ask why the variant arose, from a scientific perspective. The best theory is that it is a combination of two factors: confusion with the word "miniature", and sound changes in English that have cause unstressed vowels to be pronounced indistinguishably (i.e., unless you are trying very hard to enunciate, there is no perceptible difference between an unstressed "i" sound and an unstressed "u" sound). Now we're getting into questions of etymology, phonology, psycho-linguistic issues like "what information about words in our lexicon do we carry in our brain", etc., all absolutely fascinating topics in their own right. Just saying "miniscule is wrong" obscures all of this. By the way, the case of "miniscule" is by no means unusual. There are absolutely loads of words that changed for reasons with no etymological justification. One example is island -- the "s" has no etymological justification, at all, and the current spelling gradually became more common than the earlier "iland" (and various other variants) between 1500 and 1700 by analogy with the probably unrelated Latin word insula. Words changing because of phonological perception effects is very common too: apron comes from an earlier "napron", because of "a napron" getting re-analyzed as "an apron". For those of us who are interested in the sorts of things that happened to apron and island centuries ago, it's cool to witness a similar phenomenon in progress today. (3) Language policing is very closely connected with classism and, in some countries (including the US), racism. I'm not accusing anyone in this thread of that, but it's a good reason to be sensitive about it.
diminoten 7y ago
Hah, I appreciate this note, TIL!