InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "The Keebler Elf made the color"

auctasinistra (auctasinistra) wrote,
@ 2008-09-01 09:01:00

Current mood:

Not actually all that cranky

Because it's Belabor Day (isn't it?)

And I do like to vent from time to time.

It's not jive, people. That's, literally, bullshit (well, it's slang for it, anyway). It's JIBE. When something does (or does not) line up or make sense, the word you're looking for is jibe.

And a minor added rantlet (I've ranted about this before). What the hell ever happened to knelt? Did the Bush administration ban that too? I'm not sure I ever saw or heard anyone use the word "kneeled" until the last 5 years or so, on the net.

And, as ever, anyone who wants to piss and moan about the use or misuse of a particular word or phrase? Have at it! It's always interesting.

(Post a new comment)

effie_chan
2008-09-01 02:01 pm UTC (link)

I've said this before but I'll say it again, because this problem is as persistent as [insert clever analogy here]: Why do people confuse "effect" and "affect". Native speakers, that is. I'm not native and the misuse of these two words stands out like a sore thumb to me. Seriously, it drives me up the wall every time I read it.

Also, about the word "to prove". Now, I'm not sure about this but wasn't it "prove, proved, proven" instead of "prove, proved, proved"? I was sure of this but maybe I'm imagining things. Or is this an American thing?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	aunty_marion 2008-09-02 07:08 am UTC (link)
	And, even more confusingly, both 'affect' and 'effect' can be used as verbs as well as nouns. With different meanings. and implications. "I will effect a change in your emotional affect." "This will affect the effects of your house renovations." (Reply to this) (Parent)

	auctasinistra 2008-09-02 07:07 pm UTC (link)
	I think the reason people (journalists are painfully guilty of this) have started using "impact" for everything is they simply can't remember whether it's affect or effect. Drives me nuts. It's just not that hard. I use proven, but (like kneeled) I'm not sure proved is wrong. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(no subject) -

effie_chan, 2008-09-02 07:42 pm UTC

theentwife
2008-09-01 02:28 pm UTC (link)

I really don't think grammar and spelling are being taught the way they were years ago, when I was in school. Things like "rediculous" are becoming common place instead of abberations, even among the supposedly well-educated. And no one seems to understand how to use the subjective any more -- seeing "was" instead of "were" drives me up the wall -- and I see it even in supposedly edited and proofread newswire stories!!!!

~~ shakes head and mourns for the current state of the English language ~~

Persephone

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	slashpine 2008-09-01 09:05 pm UTC (link)
	icon love!!!! (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(no subject) -

theentwife, 2008-09-02 06:49 am UTC

auctasinistra
2008-09-02 07:09 pm UTC (link)

I think it's because reading is less common (not that it was ever terribly common). People say "That's REEEdiculous!" and if you've only heard it (because all you fucking do is watch TV ... sigh) why wouldn't you think that's how it's spelled? A lot of the common errors can be blamed on that - by which I mean it's a reasonable argument, not that it's necessarily always the reason.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	carpet_diemon 2008-09-01 02:35 pm UTC (link)
	Forgive me mother, for I have sinned. Whenever I ought to have said "knitted", my brain says "knat!" (Reply to this) (Thread)

	auctasinistra 2008-09-02 07:09 pm UTC (link)
	Surely it's knit, knat, knut? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(no subject) -

slashpine, 2008-09-02 09:26 pm UTC

ships_harry
2008-09-01 02:46 pm UTC (link)

Heh, I was made to cringe by "kneeled" just last night. Oh, and look! Oddly enough, it has a little red line under it in my bodgy basic browser spell-checker. That might be a hint :p.

*Burgandy vs Burgundy
*Discrete used for discreet
*Illicit used for elicit

I'll second the effect/affect thing. It's particularly annoying because I know that if I use "affect" to mean, say, emotion (like "negative affect", harking back to rusty old psyc class days), someone'll just assume I'm misusing "effect" and talking about something completely different. Grargh.

And that'll do for this morning.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	effie_chan 2008-09-01 03:10 pm UTC (link)
	That's right! I almost forgot about that particular use for "affect". (Reply to this) (Parent)

	auctasinistra 2008-09-02 07:11 pm UTC (link)
	I've had a few instances of people trying to correct my usage because they'd got so used to illiteracies. I force myself not to kill them. ;-) Then again, I'm so fusty and old-fashioned I still use "storey" for the floors in a building, so ... (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(no subject) -

ships_harry, 2008-09-02 07:37 pm UTC

(no subject) -

auctasinistra, 2008-09-02 07:40 pm UTC

	banefire 2008-09-01 03:32 pm UTC (link)
	My particular bitch is about the word "Lose". I've seen screeds of stories that the authors have misused that word. Using "Loose" instead of "Lose", "Loosed" instead of "Lost". It drives me up the wall!!! Argh! :P ;) (Reply to this)

	accioslash 2008-09-01 04:50 pm UTC (link)
	"It's a mute point." No, it isn't. It's a moot point. sigh (Reply to this) (Thread)

	auctasinistra 2008-09-02 07:12 pm UTC (link)
	I've heard people ARGUE this one! "Well, it means that you have to go mute and not say anything because the point is already decided..." ARGH! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	realpestilence 2008-09-01 04:56 pm UTC (link)
	I hate poems or songs that use the wrong word just so it fits in the meter. It's "shone" on her hair, not "shined"...and that has the same amount of syllables, so there's no excuse! glares (Reply to this)

Grammar in fandom is past tense

slashpine
2008-09-01 06:10 pm UTC (link)

OMG yes, when fan fics use bad grammar it's worse than being a bad story - cos you want to keep reading but it HURTS.

Now me, I tend to accept kneeled as an acceptable alternative to knelt, along with creeped/crept (as in, "he creeped slowly into the room"), or weaved/wove, or similarly, spinned/span. Most Americans, for instance, will write "he spinned quite a tale," not "he span his tale of magic webbed with details...."

It's a historical linguistic thing, combined with geographic and social class differences. And OMG you got me going... I LOVE YOU FOR CARING ABOUT THIS! I have actually been bookmarking differences in past tenses, because of exactly this kind of thing which DRIVES ME NUTS when (a) it isn't IC with the story and/or author's "voice," or (b) I can't rationalize the teeth-jarring sound of bad-writing bad-grammar every time I hit a nonstandard or unexpected usage.

But it's gonna take me two posts. First, the linguistics reasons for why it might be right, wrong, or OMG BOTH. And then? My personal latest non-verb that I hate so bad, I BACK-BUTTON when I see it because at that point, I'm out of the story anyway.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: Grammar in fandom is past tense ships_harry 2008-09-01 08:13 pm UTC (link)
	spinned/span Span, or spun? I always though span referred to distance and bridges :). Your next comment (haven't read it yet) looks to be really interesting! Watching US telly, it seems as though my own personal bugbear ("lay" used for "lie") is incredibly prevalent and may actually be some regional thing. Still wrong, though ;). (Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: Grammar in fandom is past tense

auctasinistra
2008-09-02 07:14 pm UTC (link)

And kneeled isn't wrong, of course. I was careful not to call it that. :-) But it's a curious thing that, like holding a fork in your fist, "I kneeled down" was something little kids said and then, as they got older, stopped saying. I don't remember any adult saying "it's 'knelt,' dear" (they might have, but I don't recall - it was a LONG time ago), but "kneeled" was something little kids said because they hadn't learned grown up English. Now, I see it fairly regularly, so I wonder if things like "I sitted at the table and eated my dinner, mommy" are coming back ...

Hey! It's lolcatspeak! :-)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong

slashpine
2008-09-01 07:37 pm UTC (link)

English has two systems of verb formation, inherited from German: strong and weak. There have been historic changes, plus geographic differences and some class differences too. And then some good-old-fashioned wrongness (which for English practically *is* the rule).

"Strong verbs" form past tenses through vowel change. Unless you love the fine details of linguistic classification, they simply look "irregular": eat/ate/eaten; see/saw/seen; know/knew/known; take/took/taken.

A few strong verbs don't change, like set/set/set and put/put/put: "Watch as I put the first ingredient in; yesterday I put in the aconite; the vials had been put away."

Most strong verbs are old and very common, so we learn them the hard way: constant correction as we grow up.

"Weak verbs" are easy. They don't change the main vowel, simply add uniform endings to the stem: walk/walked/walked; move/moved/moved; toll/tolled/tolled, etc.

Some verbs are half and half, changing the stem in one past tense form but taking the weak ending in the other: show/showed/shown or more commonly: tell/told/told; think/thought/thought; say/said; see/seen; sleep/slept.

What a pain! Especially when similar words take different verb forms, like lie/lied/lied (to tell a falsehood), as distinguished from both lay/laid/laid (transitive, to set something down) and lie/lay/lain (intransitive, to recline [although the past participle 'lain' is increasingly often rendered as laid, e.g. "He had *laid in bed for a week" instead of "He had lain there long enough, Snape thought").

Fine distinctions of meaning, as well as time, regionalism, and class have led to changes and in some cases, multiple forms. BBC's h2g2 has a brief essay summarizing some of this.

1. New verbs-especially those from nouns, like "he booked a table" or "we transitioned to the new method"-are all weak. This increases the proportion of weak verbs over time.
2. Older strong forms have become weak, with only about 100 strong verbs left in common use.

3. Some verbs have gone back and forth over time (Ex: dove and dived), with each form termed acceptable in some eras and in others, ignorant.

4. Some verbs developed both strong and weak forms for related usages: 'They hung his portrait in the Great Hall' but 'They hanged him after a mock trial.' Grammar reveals semantics; here morphology shows causality, with the strong form typically older, intransitive or more active: sit/sat/sat and lie/lay/lain spun off set/set/set and lay/laid/laid, meaning to *cause* something to sit or lie. Fall/fell/fallen developed the weak verb "fell/felled/felled" ("to cause a tree to fall"; which is pronounced "fall/falled", for the lolz).

So two forms can co-exist, with "correctness" depending on usage. But also on your age and which regional English you speak and read.

Look at: leap/leapt or leap/leaped. On the US side of the pond, weak forms are commoner: "He pleaded guilty, but still dreamed of Harry every night," vs. the equally acceptable but more likely brit-speak[ed] "pled" and "dreamt." Cf. smelled/smelt; for more, see this story in The Star.

Like different pronunciations of 'ate' (US 'eight' vs UK 'et'), social class affects usage. Ironically, there's a reversal across the pond. Older forms like "et" that are upper-class in the UK are "hillbilly" in the US. As with "snuck" vs "sneaked," the older form increasingly is reserved for "folksy" effect, with the weak verb the standard in both countries. (Ha ha, points for affect/effect in same paragraph!)

As a tech writer for gov't science documents in the western U.S., I'm more likely to see kneeled than knelt: "He put down plastic sheeting before he kneeled to sample the contamination."

But YMMV. And that's the problem. Your fanfic may be read all over the world, so the language of your neighborhood mall, or English classroom, might just sound wrong elsewhere. I think if there's a choice to be made, it should be IC for the story, not the author.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong ships_harry 2008-09-01 08:16 pm UTC (link)
	Fascinating :). And that last sentence is a very sensible one - I flinch when Severus Snape, thirty-something Englishman, says "normalcy"... but it would be perfectly okay if Sam Winchester, twenty-something US lad, used it. Even though I personally can't stand it ;). It's a US word, so it makes sense for a US-based character to use it. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong -

slashpine, 2008-09-01 08:53 pm UTC

Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong -

effie_chan, 2008-09-01 08:17 pm UTC

Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong -

slashpine, 2008-09-01 09:04 pm UTC

Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong -

auctasinistra, 2008-09-02 07:17 pm UTC

Re: Verbs: the strong, the weak, and the just plain wrong -

auctasinistra, 2008-09-02 07:19 pm UTC

Language that drives me mad...

slashpine
2008-09-01 08:18 pm UTC (link)

*Reposted because it also drives me mad that I forget to close my tags and don't take enough time to use preview! Ouch.

Here's what I hate - so much so that sometimes I simply can't read the story any further, let alone respect it:

Little constant annoyances like:

º poured for pored, as in "Hermione pored over the ancient text." It's usually Harry who "pours" over them and yeah, that's about his speed: uneducated, and spilling his pumpkin juice, too.

º confusion over the word forte pronounced "fort" and meaning "strength" -- not, in this case, a musical term, not Italian, and so not two syllables. The French word forte, coming from fencing (the strongest part of the blade, where you try to take the blows, is your "strength" or best skill), does not, of course, take a final long "A" sound. But the Italian word forte, meaning loud or strong musically, does. Dictionary.com rounds up some of the usage notes on this. It seems we can blame the confusion on snooty young Americans who *think* they're educated because they studied music -- but fail at knowing French, Italian, the differences between them, or fencing (or how to read the etymology in a dictionary). Typically, a bunch of American dictionary usage panels have just about given into the popularity of ignorance. America: where stupidity in volume always counts for more than quality or reason!

(This leads to the even more ignorant affectation of people who now think the one-syllable French word "cache" should sound the same as the two-syllable, quite different French word "cachet." Meaning they not only don't know any French - for which I totally forgive them, and in fact share that sad state - but that they don't even pay attention to spellings. *Stabs*)

But the hideous mangling of verbs I MOST DESPISE AND HATE*HATE*HATE ... so much so that I've been bookmarking some misuses of it in fan-fic just to try to figure out whether fans have increasingly lost their marbles, or just come from regions where English is an AU... is this:

º "Remus pushed back from the table and lay his hand on the front of his robe. Snape leaned over and pet the bulge where their new child had begun to show."

WTFBBQBackbutton! I can't find any style guide or grammar where this form of "lay" and "pet" are past tense. OK, a lot of people screw up lie/lay ALL THE TIME OMG YOU'D THINK THEY'D LEARN TO CHECK IT. But "pet" as the past tense? Is this simply people who confused the word with set and put, so that like "set/set/set" or "put/put/put" they now think it's pet/pet/pet? Here, read this:

1. I love to pet my dog.
*2. Yesterday I pet Nagini and she bit me.
*3. He had pet Nagini every day but she ripped his throat out anyway.

Even semi-literate Microsoft Word underlines sentences 2 and 3 as incorrect past tenses. I want to rip the story off the page every time I get this misconjugation of "pet."

But like I say, maybe there's some obscure region or as yet poorly documented social clique or class who have changed the rules for just this one verb? I'm doubtful, but willing to read the evidence. (Personally, I'd just rather never read nonstandard past tenses again.)

I SO LOVE YOU FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY TO RANT. :D I ||| you utterly, you know! Even if you like "knelt" more than "kneeled". ;-) But I can go with knelt! And think of you then, every time, which would be so cool. *worships your Snapeish precision*