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I really like reading about linguistic origins like that one. Makes me reflect on my irrational hatred towards reading "could of", "would of" and the likes. I m

by tommit 4y ago

I really like reading about linguistic origins like that one. Makes me reflect on my irrational hatred towards reading "could of", "would of" and the likes. I mean, I still get a seizure reading it, but I can only imagine some old dude yelling at the youngsters in the late 1800's like "it's called 'and per se, and'! Not ampersand! Jeez you all are the reason the english language is degrading!"

IggleSniggle 4y ago
Lawl
mywittyname 4y ago
I had a writing professor in college whose obsession with forcing us to write and speak "Queen's English" really soured me on hearing people correct someone else's grammar. Said professor went so far as to author his own style guide that we were forced to use for class because the existing ones were wrong for this reason or that. This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying.
- rawTruthHurts 4y ago
  > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. Not that you can learn anything unless it sticks to a certain set of rules.
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.
- dspillett 4y ago
  A valuable life lesson though. I've followed coding standards that I don't entirely agree with¹²³, but breaking them would cause more discomfort for the larger project than the minor irritation keeping them would cause me. I'm sure the feeling is common in other career areas too, particularly professional writing. --- [1] Not using extra space to line up similar parts of similar lines when grouped together, for instance, I find it makes things easier to read and alter afterwards [2] Some codebases absolutely hate one-line if statements, it must be in a block even if only one statement is inside the conditional and the brackets must each be on their own line. I get that for more complex code it breaks things up visually in a way that is helpful, but stretching out 20..30 characters over four lines, artificially lengthening a function significantly if it happens multiple times… [3] One FOSS project I once submitted a patch for insisted on absolutely no inline comments – all explanation had to be in the comment block at the head of the function declaration. It almost discouraged commenting, and I like to comment liberally.
  - irrational 4y ago
    [2] For me it has to do with scanning code. If if-statements are always in a block, then I can easily scan to or past it without having to stop and read what it actually says. But, if it is in a single line I have to stop and read it to understand that it is actually an if statement that was put onto a single line.
    - yissp 4y ago
      I've made the mistake of trying to add an extra statement to a one-line if and forgetting to add a block too many times. Although now GCC has -Wmisleading-indentation which should catch that.
      - anyfoo 4y ago
        Yes, exactly, it's just not worth the risk. It gets worse with preprocessor macro systems like C has, where something might look correct until you follow the macro definition.
    - 4y ago
- Archelaos 4y ago
  > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. doohureehliebeeleafþatt?
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
- CivBase 4y ago
  > This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce unnecessary complexity. However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being able to understand what people are trying to communicate is absolutely the most important feature of any language. Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds like he was just using his position to take out his frustration on others.
snarf21 4y ago
I learned about & down a wikipedia rabbit hole and was also so intrigued. Etymology and lexicology writ large are very interesting.. For example, look up the history of the classic "ye olde shoppe". The mix of cultures and the effects of time are amazing. One of my favorite word derivations is feamyng which is a collective noun for ferrets. The word itself is like a game of telephone gone wrong. Multiple mistypings in dictionaries, etc. give it quite the interesting word history.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  If you like etymology, I highly recommend The History of English Podcast. It covers the history of ampersand among many, many other things.
nsedlet 4y ago
This guy has a great set of examples of rules in English that started as bastardizations, fabrications, arbitrary preferences of some particular writer, etc.: https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444 https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444.
bradrn 4y ago
Oh, this sort of thing goes way back… here’s Swift from 1712, for instance: > I do here … complain to your Lordship … that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities … Gentlemen … introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, … as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds … They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid … Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain. — A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue [taken from https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html] Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!” (For more of this, Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I’m certain I’ve even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along these lines, though sadly I can’t seem to find it now.)
- tommit 4y ago
  I love this, thanks! "Kids these days" of language. Oh well, I'm gonna stop correcting of's used instead of have's - don't want to end up in The Unfolding of Language II. But I will definitely check out the first one, thanks for the tip!
- IncRnd 4y ago
  > Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! I had a Professor who pronounced the -ed that was at the end of a word as its own syllable. She loved doing that, and it actually wasn't noticable after a short while. > What a horrible degradation of the language!” It's not that different from people today saying "wanna" for "want to" or even "me wan go home" for "I want to go home". Idioms and dialects abound!
jayski 4y ago
Yes, language evolves torwars comfortability, written and spoken. What is incorrect today if used enough will become official. I watched a linguistics course online many years ago and that was my key take away. Water in french was originally something like "aqua", and it devolved into eau, all along the way people complained they were saying it wrong.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Language also evolves away from easy of use. For instance, complexity and secrets are created to distinguish one class of speaker from another. Rules are invented for no higher reason than distinguishing those educated in them from those not. English is full of such rules, rules we base in deep history but on examination were the creation of 18th schoolmasters or book publishers. The King/Queens English? Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. They were far better with French or German.
  - oxfeed65261 4y ago
    …or Old Norse (e.g. Cnut), or Dutch (William of Orange), any others?
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Spanish, dutch ... they were products of european houses, few of which spoke any english.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. ^Most^Several Famously of course the first two Georges, perhaps William of Orange, definitely of course William the Conquerer and his immediate successors, but I think most is a gross exaggeration.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Read through any royal writings. English was almost never used. French is by far the most commonly used language of English royals.
jpmoral 4y ago
"And the like"
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yes it's very funny how much overlap there is between people who value scientism and people who enforce static usage rules as if they are objectively correct. Among the people whose area of scientific study is the use of language and how it conveys meaning, and especially how and why it changes over time, you will not find very many hard prescriptivists. It's not wrong per se it's just not a very useful model in most contexts.
combatentropy 4y ago
"Ampersand" is like "could of", and yet is not like it. Ampersand is a change in sounds, for the sake of easier pronunciation: and per se and # original andperseand # remove spaces andpers'and # drop extra vowel, for slightly faster speech an'pers'and # drop extra consonant, for same reason anpersand # drop apostrophes ampersand # transform "n" to its neighbor, "m", because it's easier to say before "p" These are all merely changes in sounds, the consonants and the vowels, the "phonemes" as linguists call them. The course from "am not" to "ain't" follows a similar pattern. "Could of", on the other hand, is not phonological but morphological --- a change in meaning, because "of" doesn't mean "have". Or maybe it is merely typographic, because what they could have written is "could've", which sounds the same as "could of" --- and it's probably what they meant but simply made the same mistake as when you accidentally write "there" instead of "their". And I don't believe your repulsion is "irrational", as you say. There is value in preserving the current state of language, of slowing down its changes, simply for the sake of intelligibility, for now and for posterity. A single instance of one person correcting someone else's "could of" is a like throwing an ice cube atop a melting glacier, but like voting in a general election, but it is no reason to just give up. (Of course the stakes are low, so we must say it only if it will be well received.) Now there is a class of "corrections" that are misguided, I think, like the rule that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. That arose from lovers of Latin, which doesn't end sentences in prepositions because it is impossible, and they were trying to make English more like Latin.
amyjess 4y ago
> it's called 'and per se, and' It was more that they just called it "and". Rattling off the last few letters of the alphabet, it would have sounded awkward if they ended it with "X, Y, Z, and and". So they added the per se to indicate that and was the letter's name and not just stammering on a conjunction without finishing the sentence.
- collinmanderson 4y ago
  A, B, C, and D, Pray, playmates, agree. E, F, and G, Well, so it shall be. J, K, and L, In peace we will dwell. M, N, and O, To play let us go. P, Q, R, and S, Love may we possess. W, X, and Y, Will not quarrel or die. Z, and ampersand, Go to school at command. - A Book of Nursery Rhymes (1901) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part_VI https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part...
  - vincent-manis 4y ago
    I was once returning to Vancouver. Ahead of me in the Canada Customs` line was a woman and a boy around 6 years old. He was singing the Alphabet Song; when he triumphantly got to `Ecks, Why, and Zee’, the woman said `Stop it! They’ll think we’re Americans’. She had a point, it’s `Zed’.
hiccuphippo 4y ago
What ticks me of is when people use then instead of than. English is not my main language so the first time I read it I was very confused.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Same here english is not my native language. There are many other errors that makes me cringe, like people writing "could of". Most of them are done by people whose english is their primary language. But on the other hand I also see people doing similar errors in my mother tongue.
- xeromal 4y ago
  I'm a native english speaker and I can't tell you the difference between then and than. lol.
  - Rychard 4y ago
    I'm sure there's a better example, but I've always explained it like so: "than" is for comparisons; e.g. smaller _than_, older _than_ "then" is used to indicate timing; chew _then_ swallow, wash _then_ rinse It's certainly an incomplete explanation, but if someone else can share an explanation that is more succinct and/or complete than my own, I'd be interested in seeing it.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I appreciate this example. I don't know why these two words always stump me. I feel pretty capable grammatically, but my brain completely forgets to remember these examples. I'll add these examples to my notes so I can write correct emails at least. lol
    - tharkun__ 4y ago
      That is exactly how we learned it too and I can't figure out why people don't use these correctly. Another one for "than" is also if you can replace it with "instead of". "Rather than learning the language, he went to a football game". Not "Rather - then learning the language later - he went to a football game first". Well actually there 'then' is correct but I had to make a broken up sentence that you would never write but you might say it. If you want to tell someone about this, you start with 'rather' then think of explaining first that he did go learn afterwards so you interject your own sentence and then go on. But when writing you have enough time to form a proper sentence. Of course auto correction can play a role nowadays. I wrote "of" more often recently and a typoed "ofg" might be corrected to "of" and not "off". Sure. Now what I do understand is that native speakers actually forget the rules meaning the "why" something is correct. After a while you can usually just tell what's correct. It just "sounds right" and you can't explain it to someone else.
signal11 4y ago
Napron => Apron is another hilarious change, but older. What I take away from this is that pretty much every major culture “butchers” (or evolves, if you like) words on an ongoing basic.

by tommit 4y ago

IggleSniggle 4y ago

Lawl

mywittyname 4y ago

I had a writing professor in college whose obsession with forcing us to write and speak "Queen's English" really soured me on hearing people correct someone else's grammar. Said professor went so far as to author his own style guide that we were forced to use for class because the existing ones were wrong for this reason or that. This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying.

rawTruthHurts 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. Not that you can learn anything unless it sticks to a certain set of rules.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  An _un_certain set of rules, you mean. Especially as we're on about language. (-: If the set of rules were certain, we might not be having the these discussions; yea, and proscriptive grammarians and tyrants of spelling would us all be.
dspillett 4y ago
A valuable life lesson though. I've followed coding standards that I don't entirely agree with¹²³, but breaking them would cause more discomfort for the larger project than the minor irritation keeping them would cause me. I'm sure the feeling is common in other career areas too, particularly professional writing. --- [1] Not using extra space to line up similar parts of similar lines when grouped together, for instance, I find it makes things easier to read and alter afterwards [2] Some codebases absolutely hate one-line if statements, it must be in a block even if only one statement is inside the conditional and the brackets must each be on their own line. I get that for more complex code it breaks things up visually in a way that is helpful, but stretching out 20..30 characters over four lines, artificially lengthening a function significantly if it happens multiple times… [3] One FOSS project I once submitted a patch for insisted on absolutely no inline comments – all explanation had to be in the comment block at the head of the function declaration. It almost discouraged commenting, and I like to comment liberally.
- irrational 4y ago
  [2] For me it has to do with scanning code. If if-statements are always in a block, then I can easily scan to or past it without having to stop and read what it actually says. But, if it is in a single line I have to stop and read it to understand that it is actually an if statement that was put onto a single line.
  - yissp 4y ago
    I've made the mistake of trying to add an extra statement to a one-line if and forgetting to add a block too many times. Although now GCC has -Wmisleading-indentation which should catch that.
    - anyfoo 4y ago
      Yes, exactly, it's just not worth the risk. It gets worse with preprocessor macro systems like C has, where something might look correct until you follow the macro definition.
  - 4y ago
Archelaos 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. doohureehliebeeleafþatt?
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  While I'm probably responding to a joke, intelligibility isn't simply a binary. It's how we're able to have interesting connections between dialects or Danish, Swedish, Norwegian for example. The first rule of communication is knowing your audience and if one's language can be adapted in simplicity, complexity, lexicon, grammar, content, style, voice, medium &c to be more readily understood, then it's in the speaker's benefit to do so. If GP's teacher could not earnestly understand vulgar English then by all means adapt, but the sense that I'm getting is that they were being obstinate on purpose and those sort of people should live in the communicative bubble of isolation they put themselves in.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    Well, my "joke" was ment as a demonstration, that the rules have the purpose to make it easy to be understood. I bent the rules a bit, so that it should still be possible to decode my message, but not easily. This should demonstrate that rules are not completely arbitrary, even if (some) people can understand what I am saying.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  You're showing a case though where you diverge from the current conventions so much that it's incredibly hard to understand what you're saying, so I'm not sure you're going against OP's point. By the way, as a European person (speaking multiple European languages, even) living in the US for a decade, you quickly give up on taking language "rules" too seriously or else you go insane. What English (partly US English, partly "English in general") does to foreign words is... interesting. Also interesting is that unlike any other language I speak, reading a word in English is often not sufficient to know how it's pronounced. Yes, French's orthography for example seems enormously complex ("Bordeaux"?) compared to e.g. German or Italian, but it's still consistent. If I had to guess, I'd think that's too a large part because of things like the Great Vowel Shift, and loan words from multiple languages. (Not a linguist though, so eh, just stupid guesses.)
CivBase 4y ago
> This made me realize that the rules are arbitrary and what matters is if people can understand what you're saying. I disagree. Kind of. Like all languages, English is a tool. The more complicated that tool is, the harder it is to learn/use, the less effective it is. YAML and HTML are easy examples of how the complexity of a language can hurt its utility. There's something to be said for maintaining a formal spec that guards against changes that would introduce unnecessary complexity. However... a spec like that doesn't exist for English - at least not one that most of its users agree upon - and being able to understand what people are trying to communicate is absolutely the most important feature of any language. Therefor, I consider it a faux pas to strictly enforce arbitrary rules like your professor did. Frankly, it sounds like he was just using his position to take out his frustration on others.

snarf21 4y ago

I learned about & down a wikipedia rabbit hole and was also so intrigued. Etymology and lexicology writ large are very interesting.. For example, look up the history of the classic "ye olde shoppe". The mix of cultures and the effects of time are amazing. One of my favorite word derivations is feamyng which is a collective noun for ferrets. The word itself is like a game of telephone gone wrong. Multiple mistypings in dictionaries, etc. give it quite the interesting word history.

throwaway894345 4y ago
If you like etymology, I highly recommend The History of English Podcast. It covers the history of ampersand among many, many other things.

nsedlet 4y ago

This guy has a great set of examples of rules in English that started as bastardizations, fabrications, arbitrary preferences of some particular writer, etc.: https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444 https://youtu.be/JTslqcXsFd4?t=444.

bradrn 4y ago

Oh, this sort of thing goes way back… here’s Swift from 1712, for instance: > I do here … complain to your Lordship … that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities … Gentlemen … introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, … as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds … They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid … Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain. — A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue [taken from https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html https://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/proposal.html] Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! What a horrible degradation of the language!” (For more of this, Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language contains a highly amusing list of examples dating all the way back to Cicero in 46 BC, who complains that the speech of his day was sadly degraded from the great orators of the past. I’m certain I’ve even seen an Ancient Egyptian complaint along these lines, though sadly I can’t seem to find it now.)

tommit 4y ago
I love this, thanks! "Kids these days" of language. Oh well, I'm gonna stop correcting of's used instead of have's - don't want to end up in The Unfolding of Language II. But I will definitely check out the first one, thanks for the tip!
IncRnd 4y ago
> Or in other words: “It’s ‘dess-turb-uhd’, with THREE vowels! Not that nasty word ‘dess-turbd’ which is impossible to pronounce! I had a Professor who pronounced the -ed that was at the end of a word as its own syllable. She loved doing that, and it actually wasn't noticable after a short while. > What a horrible degradation of the language!” It's not that different from people today saying "wanna" for "want to" or even "me wan go home" for "I want to go home". Idioms and dialects abound!

jayski 4y ago

Yes, language evolves torwars comfortability, written and spoken. What is incorrect today if used enough will become official. I watched a linguistics course online many years ago and that was my key take away. Water in french was originally something like "aqua", and it devolved into eau, all along the way people complained they were saying it wrong.

sandworm101 4y ago
Language also evolves away from easy of use. For instance, complexity and secrets are created to distinguish one class of speaker from another. Rules are invented for no higher reason than distinguishing those educated in them from those not. English is full of such rules, rules we base in deep history but on examination were the creation of 18th schoolmasters or book publishers. The King/Queens English? Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. They were far better with French or German.
- oxfeed65261 4y ago
  …or Old Norse (e.g. Cnut), or Dutch (William of Orange), any others?
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Spanish, dutch ... they were products of european houses, few of which spoke any english.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Most English monarchs barely spoke the language. ^Most^Several Famously of course the first two Georges, perhaps William of Orange, definitely of course William the Conquerer and his immediate successors, but I think most is a gross exaggeration.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Read through any royal writings. English was almost never used. French is by far the most commonly used language of English royals.

jpmoral 4y ago

"And the like"

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Yes it's very funny how much overlap there is between people who value scientism and people who enforce static usage rules as if they are objectively correct. Among the people whose area of scientific study is the use of language and how it conveys meaning, and especially how and why it changes over time, you will not find very many hard prescriptivists. It's not wrong per se it's just not a very useful model in most contexts.

combatentropy 4y ago

"Ampersand" is like "could of", and yet is not like it. Ampersand is a change in sounds, for the sake of easier pronunciation: and per se and # original andperseand # remove spaces andpers'and # drop extra vowel, for slightly faster speech an'pers'and # drop extra consonant, for same reason anpersand # drop apostrophes ampersand # transform "n" to its neighbor, "m", because it's easier to say before "p" These are all merely changes in sounds, the consonants and the vowels, the "phonemes" as linguists call them. The course from "am not" to "ain't" follows a similar pattern. "Could of", on the other hand, is not phonological but morphological --- a change in meaning, because "of" doesn't mean "have". Or maybe it is merely typographic, because what they could have written is "could've", which sounds the same as "could of" --- and it's probably what they meant but simply made the same mistake as when you accidentally write "there" instead of "their". And I don't believe your repulsion is "irrational", as you say. There is value in preserving the current state of language, of slowing down its changes, simply for the sake of intelligibility, for now and for posterity. A single instance of one person correcting someone else's "could of" is a like throwing an ice cube atop a melting glacier, but like voting in a general election, but it is no reason to just give up. (Of course the stakes are low, so we must say it only if it will be well received.) Now there is a class of "corrections" that are misguided, I think, like the rule that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. That arose from lovers of Latin, which doesn't end sentences in prepositions because it is impossible, and they were trying to make English more like Latin.

amyjess 4y ago

> it's called 'and per se, and' It was more that they just called it "and". Rattling off the last few letters of the alphabet, it would have sounded awkward if they ended it with "X, Y, Z, and and". So they added the per se to indicate that and was the letter's name and not just stammering on a conjunction without finishing the sentence.

collinmanderson 4y ago
A, B, C, and D, Pray, playmates, agree. E, F, and G, Well, so it shall be. J, K, and L, In peace we will dwell. M, N, and O, To play let us go. P, Q, R, and S, Love may we possess. W, X, and Y, Will not quarrel or die. Z, and ampersand, Go to school at command. - A Book of Nursery Rhymes (1901) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part_VI https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Rhymes/Part...
- vincent-manis 4y ago
  I was once returning to Vancouver. Ahead of me in the Canada Customs` line was a woman and a boy around 6 years old. He was singing the Alphabet Song; when he triumphantly got to `Ecks, Why, and Zee’, the woman said `Stop it! They’ll think we’re Americans’. She had a point, it’s `Zed’.

hiccuphippo 4y ago

What ticks me of is when people use then instead of than. English is not my main language so the first time I read it I was very confused.

prmoustache 4y ago
Same here english is not my native language. There are many other errors that makes me cringe, like people writing "could of". Most of them are done by people whose english is their primary language. But on the other hand I also see people doing similar errors in my mother tongue.
xeromal 4y ago
I'm a native english speaker and I can't tell you the difference between then and than. lol.
- Rychard 4y ago
  I'm sure there's a better example, but I've always explained it like so: "than" is for comparisons; e.g. smaller _than_, older _than_ "then" is used to indicate timing; chew _then_ swallow, wash _then_ rinse It's certainly an incomplete explanation, but if someone else can share an explanation that is more succinct and/or complete than my own, I'd be interested in seeing it.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I appreciate this example. I don't know why these two words always stump me. I feel pretty capable grammatically, but my brain completely forgets to remember these examples. I'll add these examples to my notes so I can write correct emails at least. lol
  - tharkun__ 4y ago
    That is exactly how we learned it too and I can't figure out why people don't use these correctly. Another one for "than" is also if you can replace it with "instead of". "Rather than learning the language, he went to a football game". Not "Rather - then learning the language later - he went to a football game first". Well actually there 'then' is correct but I had to make a broken up sentence that you would never write but you might say it. If you want to tell someone about this, you start with 'rather' then think of explaining first that he did go learn afterwards so you interject your own sentence and then go on. But when writing you have enough time to form a proper sentence. Of course auto correction can play a role nowadays. I wrote "of" more often recently and a typoed "ofg" might be corrected to "of" and not "off". Sure. Now what I do understand is that native speakers actually forget the rules meaning the "why" something is correct. After a while you can usually just tell what's correct. It just "sounds right" and you can't explain it to someone else.

signal11 4y ago

Napron => Apron is another hilarious change, but older. What I take away from this is that pretty much every major culture “butchers” (or evolves, if you like) words on an ongoing basic.