OT: The ampersand invasion

Plenty of examples of that with a living language, most obviously with googling something.

Fark. Tho googling something does make a lot of sense.

I used to think that the BBC were supposed to be the pinnacle of good English usage, but something that has been annoying me for months is the use of the word "thrashed" instead of "beaten" for a scoreline of say

One that caused the metaphorical spraying of coffee over the keyboard in the last week, when talking about Harry's relationship with Camilla and "The Firm" one of the BBC correspondents said that "Harry considered that he had been shafted by the very organisation that was supposed to protect him"

but we who were *taught* English, simply don't. it comes naturally

Thrashed isnt the same as beaten.

He was with the deliberate leaks against Meghan.

Umm. I like to believe I was an early reader. As such my English Language pass marks depended on essays rather than an ability to explain why sentences are constructed as they are.

I am regularly impressed by the apostrophe wars and other corrective discussion in here:-)

Yesterday, I spent half an hour of an online meeting correcting the use of apostrophes in a technical document. I can't say that my punctuation is perfect, but I do get annoyed by educated people not understanding where the apostrophe should be placed for possession by singular and plural subjects and that it should not be used for plurals of an item (the grocer's apostrophe).

Am 12/01/2023 um 18:24 schrieb Chris B:

Does the BBC World Service still exist?

I grew up in Italy listening to the BBC WS on shortwave and BBC Radio 4 on longwave at night (yes, I'm that old).

They would still use 'I shall' and 'we shall' in the 1990s.

Hochdeutsch, just like modern Italian, is a made up language to unify gazillions of different dialects, but neither of them will die out as long as bureaucratic entities require it.

If anything, I would say that English risks serious splintering, as it's used as a second language by just about everybody.

Ha, yes, I listened to it on short wave while resident in California. Eventually you could get it on KQED-FM, the local PBS station.

Things you were taught *don't* come naturally, or you wouldn't need to be taught them.

No-one ever teaches native English speakers *adjective order*, for example, but we (nearly) all get it right:

The world service largely carried on independent of the Woke brigade

I remember picking up 'Voice of America' on my 27Mhz RC receivers if tuned a little sideways

What I mean is once taught, it then comes naturally.

I am horrified to see how children are taught to hold a pen these days as well

It looks dreadfully awkward - are they actually _taught_ that?

What has it got to do with bureaucratic entities. The town I live in in Australia has always been where vast numbers of Italian immigrants have chosen to move to when they migrated here and since there are so many Italians here, most of the immigrants themselves have almost no english at all, essentially because they don't need it.

We have the weird situation that many of them can't communicate with some of the other Italians either, because of the dialect differences.

But those don't create a different language. We have never seen anything like the split that produced Dutch and Afrikaans.

The closest it gets is the american/english split and that doesnt prevent effective communication, just a bit of mindless anal stuff with things like train and railway station, But even the most rabid use some amicanisms now like OK and airport.

It still exists but not in the way that it operated 20+ years ago. Back then it was funded by the Foreign Office and had its own character building on the Strand called 'Bush House', even though it was called the "BBC World Service".

Now it has been combined with normal BBC journalism and also morphed in with BBC Global TV output and is funded by the BBC, (entirely?).

The lease on Bush House ran out. Since Broadcasting House was being extended, it was chaeper to put all the eggs in one basket.

Verbing weirds language.

Brian