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Re: [OM] Common language, was Cleaning Old Price Tag

Subject: Re: [OM] Common language, was Cleaning Old Price Tag
From: andrew fildes <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 11:24:06 +1000
No objection to the dynamic changes in language at all. Just pig-ignorant errors which creep into common usage! I cheerfully embrace reasonable split-infinitives, for example. My own dialect has changed, not to mention my ideolect and ethnolect. :) I even bought a digital camera, dammit. Some neologisms are reasonable and some shifts are attractive or sensible but many changes are more complex, more obscure and just downright uglier than the words or expressions that they replace. No excuse can be made for that.
Andrew



Different dialects of English are spoken in different parts of England, of the UK and of the world. None of the dialects are the same as they were 100 years ago, or a hundred years before that or a hun............zzzzz. Living languages change, like all living things. Why not just get over it, rejoice in speaking a living, vibrant language and enjoy the new bud, flowers, shoots and branches.

If you don't want your language to change, take up a dead one.

Moose

andrew fildes wrote:

That's a common American usage I think. One of my pet horrors. The confusion of 'In a moment' for 'For a moment.' Shudder. It's rapidly becoming the accepted use (not while I live and breathe)

It doesn't care.

, like the substitution of 'pressurised' for 'pressured.'

My US English spell checker agrees with me on a spelling of 'pressurized'. In California, the two words have different usages. If I put a cartridge that is filled with CO2 compressed beyond one atmosphere in a vise and squeeze it, I putting pressure on a pressurized container. We would never say pressurizing a pressured container. I suggest that this is a useful distinction. A quick look at a dictionary site suggests that pressurize may only apply to gas or liquid, which would fit the above example. It is also used around here in a metaphoric sense, as in describing a room full of emotional tension as a 'pressurized atmosphere'.





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