OT: Where did our language go?

Tony Blair tore up the rule book as too elitist, so now everybody speaks a different form of corrupted dialect, there is no standard, and Big Words that people have read, but never heard spoken are regularly mispronounced, and then everybody just copies.

True, but irrelevant. The h is silent in French. "Le Hôtel" is spoken as "lotel"

People of French extraction (London's Cockneys) regularly dropped ALL their aitches.

Leading to another habit of those that considered themselves superior, emphasising them with massively aspirated 'haitches'. Then the upper classes, originally Norman French, mostly with French as a second language, dropped them also.

So the educated middle classes preserved the H mostly, and the less educated middle classes emphasised their H's to distinguish themselves from the proles

Pas devant les domestiques...

They are class jumping. Trying to apply the rules of a class they don't belong to. Without having learnt them.

It cracks me up to her Labour MPs talking about 'going to conference' when they mean going to *the* labour party conference.

Its pure lower middle class affectation.

Its as French as Hotel

The convention is that you either use 'a' and aspirate the 'h' as in 'a hard day's night' or you use an 'an' and drop the H as in an'otel

Imagine John Lennon singing 'An Hard Days Night' He would have been laughed off stage

Now I was taught to use the common english form - A Hotel- - except when speaking French or in the company of a few of the upper classes who would use the French form. Dropping aitches was considered vulgar.

I 'aven't 'ad an 'oneymoon...was typical London Cockney Speak, the prototype of Estuary English

The point is that depending where a word comes from, and how it gets incorporated determine the applied rules.

Talking about an historic event identifies the presenter as not out of the top drawer, but honestly, who cares?

Karun Chandok, ex F1 driver and now F1 commentator, has impeccable English learnt at an Indian school, He is the only commentator to correctly say 'apices' instead of 'apexes' when referring to corners...

...but he often says 'isn't it' when he means 'doesn't it?' or 'hasn't it?'

We are no longer ruled by an educated upper or upper middle class, we are ruled by poorly educated lower middle class people, and their mode of speech will prevail.

I never used 'EMF' as a professional electronics engineer, outside of academia.

'What's the voltage on that anode?' 'a couple of kay vee'

We would casually talk about current though. Volts or voltage and current . Never EMF and current

Sorry to disappoint you Ian, but EMF means both electromagnetic field

and has for some time, which is why we dont use it. It's poncey and ambiguous

Pass me the rheostat....

I'll swap you for the condenser! :)

If we have now reached the jocular end of this saga.. as a technical apprentice I spent 3 months working in the electrical test bay. Part of this time was in the *flash* test section where a high voltage probe was used to check there were no unintended electrical linkages to the equipment chassis. Inevitably carelessness set in and I managed to get a couple of thousand volts up my arm:-)

Two other dropped articles are with 'carnival' (usually when referring to the Notting Hill Carnival) and with 'taser'.

Absolutely. I didn't *say* it was the source of derivation!

That sounds logical.

Could have been either.

I'd interpret "up my arm" as meaning that (for example) I touched a high-voltage terminal with a finger and current flowed up my arm to my torso and then to some point that was earthed.

I'd interpret "across my arm" as meaning that one side of my arm touched the high voltage terminal and the other side of the same arm was earthed

- so current flowed from one side to the other in preference to flowing up my arm to my torso.

Nicely expounded.

Hand to elbow. I had casually leant on something active while touching the chassis I was testing. No energy involved, bit like mains powered electric fencer.

Nah! Voltages are 'across' and 'currents' go through (or up/down in your case) :o)

I think that's why middle and upper class Russians spoke French in Tsarist times.

So how you distinguish between the two current flows that I described, by means of simple prepositions? I take your point about the use of across for voltage and through for currents.