OT: Where did our language go?

Or go back a few years and it'd be typed B. B. C.

Horrible. It's good that things change.

App is a word in modern English. It's not an abbreviation any more!

nib

If what you wrote is true, the English (viking) city of York would have been named New New York. Mind you Frank Sinatra nearly got it right.

Alan

I would go along with that, and I am as pedantic as the next person. I do, however, bristle at being called a 'chair' as opposed to a chairman (or charwoman if that applies)

I have a friend here in the UK who felt that the word 'Program' was an abuse of our language and could not accept that a 'Programme' was something completely different. Thankfully, his death brought an end to that argument. Not that we were arguing at the time of his demise.

The correct terms here are:

Mr Chairman - if the chairman is male Madame Chairman - if the chairman is female

That reminds me of one of the electronics magazines in the 1970s and 80s which had a house style of using lower-case letters with a full-stop after each one, for the letters in acronyms - and I mean pronounceable acronyms, not unpronounceable initialisms.

So you had

r. a. m. e. p. r. o. m. l. a. s. e. r.

when the rest of the world wrote these as RAM, EPROM and LASER (or even laser).

This made it a real chore to read their articles. The extra white space and full stops wasted a lot of space, as well.

It's interesting how punctuation and layout styles have changed.

I remember in the late 1960s being taught at primary school to write a name and address on an envelope as:

Mr. J. Smith, 12, High-Street, Suburb, Town, Herts..

The final double-full-stop was most important: the first one denoted that Hertfordshire had been abbreviated and the second one denoted that this was the end of the address.

All road names had to have a hyphen between the name and the "Road", "Street", "Avenue", etc.

The indentation was judged as "a finger space" offset from the previous line.

Nowadays it would be written as

Mr J Smith

Mr Smith might even be addressed as "John Smith" on the envelope nowadays.

And never forget the mandatory double space after a full-stop at the end of a sentence when typing something.

My grandpa often sent typewritten letters to my sister and me, rather than handwriting them, and his style was instantly recognisable: a space between any word and the punctuation mark that followed it, two spaces after a full stop, any over-familiar and abbreviated term enclosed in single quotes:

I remember cringing when I received birthday cards from grandparents or "aunties" (*) which were addressed to Master [my name] - thank goodness that form of address for young boys has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

(*) That's "aunty" in the sense of "friend of my mum" - any friend of your parents was a courtesy "Uncle" or "Aunty". Maybe that was peculiar to my family because my parents don't have siblings so I have no real aunts, uncles or cousins.

Or "Chair-Thing" if the chairperson is of undecided gender. ;-)

And did you mean "chairwoman" or "charwoman"?

Indeed. The Companies Acts make clear it is a gender neutral position.

These must be the same people who, before I retired, would ask me why the printer ejected a blank page after everything they printed. They treat the word processor like a f****ng typewriter.

That rule really pisses me off. Which Bastard Grammarian from Hell decided to make "to be" an exception to the general rule of "subject verb object" - as in "I saw him" - and inflicted "It is I" on the world? Of course, "It is I" must always be followed by "Leclerc" - "It is I, Leclerc", as said in 'Allo, 'Allo.

The rules about whether or not to use the subjunctive always bewildered me. I think that the gist is "If you are suggesting something that is possible, use the normal tense; if you are suggesting something preposterous and fanciful, use the subjective."

So "If I was cold, I would turn the heating on" but "If I were a rich man" (so unlikely as to be not worth considering) and "If I were you" (logically impossible).

Then you've got the horrible rules about shall/will. One indicates simple future and the other denotes "striving to achieve something, overcoming all obstacles". Fair enough. But our Bastard Grammarian from Hell decided to have a laugh and reverse the sense depending on the pronoun:

I shall see you tomorrow (simple future) I will pass this exam (I am determined to)

but

You/He/We/They will see you tomorrow (simple future) You/He/We/They shall pass this exam (determination)

That rule seems to have fallen out of favour and "will" tends to be used through, with italics (or spoken emphasis) used to denote determination.

There are some affectations that, thankfully, are dying out. "Let's see if we can't beat last year's record". "See if", used to mean "try, strive", should take "can" - unless you really *do* mean that you are trying *not* to beat the record. ;-)

Bad luck old boy.

Then, in addition, English has a large number of tenses which sometimes confuse Johnny Foreigner. Passing from Switzerland into Germany, the customs man said to me "Where are you coming from?" and was confused when I answered "Geneva". What he should have been asking was "Where do you come from?", to which I would have replied (in my case), "London".

Then there's:

since - point in time in the past for - period of time

I tend to regard that as "yoof" affectation similar to the rising inflection after every person's name or every noun in a spoken sentence:

"I went to the cinema (rising tone) and I saw John (rising) and Sarah (rising) in the queue (rising)."

It's as if there are unspoken questions "you know which cinema I mean, don't you?", "You know what a queue is, don't you?" and "You know who John and Sarah are, don't you?".

Another one which gets my goat is "I could care less". No, you *don't* mean "could"; you mean "couldn't" - as in "I care so little that I could not care any less that I already do".

But the ultimate naffness is the "was ... like" construction used in the sense of "said" or other similar words implying speech, when telling a story and relating a conversation:

"I saw Sarah and I was, like, 'Fancy seeing you here', and she was, like, 'I managed to get off work early, so I got here earlier than I expected'.

What's wrong with

"I saw Sarah and I said/exclaimed 'Fancy seeing you here'" etc

Then there is the American "I wish I would have", instead of "I wish I had".

The first is American, the second English.

One that annoys me is people using 'may' and 'might' interchangeably. 'May' means 'is permitted' while 'might' means 'possibly'.

True, but also the first is illogical whereas the second makes sense.

Did I say anything about DD/MM/YYYY versus MM/DD/YYYY? Wash my mouth out with soap and water! Mustn't ridicule our friends across the Pond.

That is true, as far as it goes, but you can also use 'may' to mean 'possibly', can't you? As in, "I didn't sleep well last night, so I may fall asleep on the job today, whether that is permitted or not."

Google suggests a better distinction of of 'may' and 'might' as being: "The word may is typically used in the present tense to indicate something that's likely to happen or to ask for permission. The word might is typically used in the past tense to describe something that's unlikely to happen or situations that didn't take place."

After returning home to England after living in the US for some 30 years, that pretty much describes their whole use of the ENGLISH language.

We had a Kentucky Mutt dog for 14 years, we reckoned she was more intelligent than about 50% of the people we knew there. (Ducks to avoid 2nd Amendment hail of bullets).

How many people actually know the 2nd Amendment?

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I rarely heard any reference to the "Well regulated Militia" part of that, only "The Right to Bear Arms".

Personally, I think that Switzerland does this better. At least they regulate the weapons held by their citizens. I can't remember the last time there was a school shooting in Zurich or Bern.

Don't forget the confusing use of "momentarily", used to mean "in a short time" instead of "for a short period of time".

Well spotted: I did mean Chairwoman (Freudian slip?)

However, it would be difficult to address a female as 'Madam Chairperson'. How you would address a male chairperson eludes me.