OT: The ampersand invasion

That's been bugging me too. People know there's some sort of rule about it (putting the first person pronoun last) but having got part way there they neglect the case of the pronoun. And as you say, it's so simple to test if it actually sounds right.

Datum/data gets me (I saw someone using "datums" recently) although I think the correct form is by now lost to common use.

'Datums' is correct when referring to reference points, eg in civil engineering.

But is that Date-Umms or Dart-Umms ?

I think it's because kids are told off saying, "Me and John went to the flicks," and think that "I" is always more correct.

Am 10/01/2023 um 13:32 schrieb Ian Jackson:

I am pissed off by this sort of statement.

The English language is not "difficult"; it's just inconsistent.

Dutch, German, Italian and French are way more difficult than English. Just ask all the monolingual English "expats" who live abroad and rarely go beyond "Una cerveza, si vous plait, danke".

On 05 Jan 2023, Davey wrote

-snip-

It's always been around ("refained pronunciation"), but it does seem to be more frequent. I recently spied a possessive "I" -- "His and I's daughter".

I wonder if that will go the way of "memorandum", where standard usage accepts both "memoranda" and the naturalised "memorandums".

Latiin was pretty easy. but I forgot it all. French I can pass in, badly. Accent is good, grammar not so much.

My German nephew said he found it easier to read Immanuel Kant in translated English than in German.

Hochdeutsche is a dying language.

If enough uneducated people use it, then it will

On a similar note, the battle appears to have been lost - it certainly was in my last place of work - with "criteria".

On the TV this morning, a nice young lady from Citizens Advice, talking about people trying to get removed from their Smart Meter Prepay status, said that they may need to 'evidence their situation'. I thought that 'evidence' was a noun, not a verb. But the, I received education in grammar when I was at school.

Today people don't even know how you use plurals anyway.

The police is racist? The whole body of them? Or just some members of the police..

The tendency to use the singular in every single case is rampant.

The facts of the matter is that no one thinks rules are for them any more. Blairs Britain

"There's no noun that can't be verbed."

Oh, that is the American influence. Making verbs from nouns, like 'burglarise' 'incentivise' etc etc.

They think it makes them sound smart. It actually makes them sound uneducated.

I've even heard "compositionize" where I'd say "composed"

My favourite was 'conceptualize' for 'conceive'. Spoken by the great Johnny Carson, no less.

Anesthesiologist instead of anaesthetist.

I just heard the most extraordinary statement 'there *were* as many cases of elective surgery as there *was* before Covid..."

Sheesh!

Going forward instead of 'in future' or even 'henceforward'

Yes! I hate it. So does Jacob Rees-Mogg.