What was it derived from though? Often words do have an original form that they started form.
I mean when did Television get coined and why did radio and Television often get followed by the word Set, as its one item not a set of items, like a canteen of Cutlery, after all?? The other thing that does confuse one is in tools. People say drill, when they mean Drill bit etc, its a minefield. The English language is scattered with bits of other languages and apparently made up stuff for no obvious reason. Don't get me started on plurals. Brian
I have no issue with so, but using it or any other oft used syntax can be very irritating. I remember at a Janice Ian Concert back in the 90s, after a song she said, so there were were at Marks and Spencers, and proceeded to describe a sales pith about using her music in their campaigns, but failed because so much of the current album was about sex. Rather amusing, but if every break fo chat had started the same way, it could have become annoying. Brian
I think one of the issues as I said in another similar thread that we inherit words from other languages. I mean you don't say Sheeps nor fungusses do you? However where did pair or scissors come from?, there are lots of those, and not just pliers, cutters etc, but also clothing like trousers, when clearly they are just one item. Brian
I do agree about tense, since I used to have to sub edit peoples reviews of games etc, and they would often be in the now at one point and the past somewhere else.
Also muddled writing where a part of the game that belongs in an earlier part of the review was suddenly introduced and you then had to make space for it in the correct place. However, the only reason for doing that was clarity, not any adherence to correctness by the rules of English. Brian
Now we are getting on to dialects, a whole new subject. There has been a push in recent years for people on the media to have regional accents. The problem I find for example is that a broadcaster with a really broad Glasgow or Belfast accent is incomprehensible to a southerner like myself. I suspect the reverse may be true but cannot prove it. Brian
Probably at about the time when specific science subjects in schools such as chemistry and physics got all lumped together under general science, GCE's and A-levels got easier, standards of education generally started to decline, mobile phones and 'social media' became widely used by the younger generation leading to all sorts of abbreviations, and Americanisms started to penetrate the English language in quantity (my pet hate is 'multiple' when we used to say 'several' or 'many').
I think it started in the US, but I could be wrong. Possibly as an appalling example of "management newspeak" to which many people subscribe. One person uses it, another hears it, and it spreads like a rash. Other examples are "going forward", "deep diving", and the perennial "blue sky thinking".
I refused to use these nonsensical expressions at work, (I am now retired) and had little time for those who did. This did my promotion chances no good. But when I saw that many of those above me had little idea of singular and plural, the correct use of tenses, the use of aspostrophes, the difference between their, there, and they're, and even to, too, and two, I had no desire to be among them.
As Frankie Boyle noted, it's a grammatical f****ng indicator that there's a f****ng noun coming up, a bit like how f****ng Germans always put the f****ng verb at the f****ng end of a f****ng sentence.
Stackechange has discussed this and come up with two suggestions:
the word "television", by itself, referred to the medium, not the box, so "television set" was used to refer to the box.
A TV is actually composed of many components with specific functions: a radio receiver, a tuning control, a pre-amplifier, an amplifier, a video processing unit, a display screen. ... So the term "TV set" refers to all those components, housed in a single cabinet.
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Noted in stackexchange, but I think the main reason, is the term is carried over from radio sets, when in the early days the radio, loudspeaker, HT battery and LT accumulator were in separate boxes, before being brought together in one box.
As an aside, on a Sarah Beeny tart-up-your-house repeat the other night, a young couple mentioned they had upgraded their "sideboard" to be a bluetooth speaker. Thee and me would know it as a "radiogram".
My mentor came from Greenock, which is even better :-)
Great character. He was a minister. He said that because his parishioners were to be found in the pub on a Saturday night it was his moral and spiritual duty as the parish minister to be there too..
I was the same: I never let "blue-sky thinking", "thinking outside the box" etc pass my lips. The worst is "leveraging" - always pronounced "levveraging" (American) rather than "leeveraging" (British) even by Brits. I still have not idea WTF it means.
Then you get all the financial jargon that creeps into management briefings. I worked for a company that had "merged with" (management-speak for "been taken over by") a Finnish company. At an annual briefing, in the local ice rink (I kid you not), a Finnish manager stood up and spoke in a very strong guttural Finnish accent - there were random phrases like "rat-ex" and "op-ex" (I think they are short for "rationalised expenditure" and "operating expenditure"), and he ended up getting all of use to chant a phrase. We had no idea whatsoever he was saying, but we faithfully repeated his guttural sounds. I think it was something like "go do" (as in "now make it happen - do as I tell you to") but to be honest it could have been a war-chant - after all, he did tell us to go out and kill the customers (I think he meant "kill" (do better than) our *competitors*).
As a communication exercise, it was a complete waste of an otherwise productive day. It would have been so much better if the British heads of department (people who we actually *knew* and *trusted*) had given the briefing at a local departmental level, with their added emphasis and scepticism, and saying how it was relevant to *us*.
I got quite good at understanding Finnish-accented English, but it is a lot harder than (for example) French-, German- or Spanish-accented English because they don't pronounce the same word in the same way in successive sentences so you can't just make up a mental conversion table of vowel sounds. OK, their English was *considerably* better than my Finnish (which is non-existent) but if the accent is so strong that you struggle to catch the odd word (and some the phrases and sentiments were *very* odd - like "kill the customers") then maybe they are not the right person to be giving the briefing to English people. I didn't ask them to take us over!
When I was at work there was a workplace survey and one of the complaints that emerged was a lack of communication between the top of the company and the rest of the workforce. Unfortunately this resulted in a 2 hour "death by Powerpoint" briefing by senior management that for many in the company further confirmed that senior management were poor at communication :)
I say! It's because he holds soirees and afternoon teas with invited audiences. Attendees have to dress up in 17thC costumes and wear powdered wigs, don't you know.
I think it means that f'rinstance if you have some skill or experience in some area that is not being used at the moment because your business does not need it, you can "leverage" (i.e., use) that skill by taking over some other company where you can employ that skill. But someone else may have a better definition.
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