Another point about spelling. In the Constitution of the United States,

[MineralMan]

the word "chuse" is used. At the time that document was written, that spelling of the word we now write as "choose" was common. Today, it would be seen by most people as a spelling error.

Language changes over time. We're seeing it change today, as we watch. For example, "data" is now used as a singular noun, and is accepted as such by many publications. Purists will tell you that it is the plural form of "datum," but they have lost that battle already. "Datum" is a Latin word. We don't speak or write Latin any longer. Usage has turned "data" from a plural form to a singular form. Today, it is a collective plural that we use as a singular noun.

"Text" has become a verb, just in the past few years, as well. Usage.

Language is always changing. Many people resist such changes. Their resistance is futile. Usage will prevail. Thus has it been, and thus shall it always be.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

1. Ok ...great, I chuse to accept that data you provided...

Happy Holidays, MM.

[MineralMan]

2. Glad to hear it. Best wishes to you, as well.

[panader0]

3. Language definitely evolves.

Sheriff used to be Shire Reeve.
Sabotage comes from the French textile workers putting their wooden
sabot shoes in the gears to stop the factories.
The examples are endless and as vast as our English vocabulary.
Years ago, when I was a student, I postulated that language was a net,
thrown into the sea of life's experience. When the net is drawn back,
the sea has not been captured but the net is wet.

[MineralMan]

5. Great examples!

Like you, I'm always interested in word origins. I love language, simply because it is so informative about history.

The language we speak and write shapes our thoughts, as well. Even though most of us don't know the origins of the words we use, those origins still inform the meanings of those words. Our minds are affected by those meanings.

I know a couple of other languages pretty well, and that knowledge helps me understand the people who speak them as their native languages.

I don't expect people to know where the words they say or write came from, but looking into that is a very interesting way to spend some time, I think. I find it entertaining, but I'm a very strange person, I'll admit.

Thanks!

[moriah]

7. I thought English didn't borrow words, but instead...

... pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

[panader0]

9. lol

[MineralMan]

19. Bwahaha!

[3catwoman3]

28. What an interesting background on the origin...

...of sabotage. I love things like this! Thnx for adding to my knowledge.

[ProudLib72]

38. My Hebrew professor in grad school hated it when people misused Hebrew words in English

She had to tell us the story about how offended she was when she overheard a mother tell her daughter at the shoe store that sandals were called "sandals" because you wore them at the beach and the sand got between your toes. I think she managed to resist telling the mother that "sandal" is Hebrew for "shoe", but she sure vented to us!

[ismnotwasm]

4. It changes

And even some of the internet shortcuts are affecting language. What it must remain, however, is organized, else we will no longer understand one another.

Languages are a bit plastic, responding to cultural shifts as well as other languages quite easily. It’s more difficult to say for certain when permanent changes happen.

[MineralMan]

10. Changes are permanent when the New York Times style sheet

says they are. Or so I believe, anyhow.

The most recent language trend is the use of "they" "their" and other forms as singular, gender-neutral words. That's still not fully accepted, but will be within the next few years. When you start seeing it in the New York Times, it will be a permanent shift.

For now, though, I have to stick with other gender-neutral pronouns to avoid problems.

[ismnotwasm]

15. I tend to do that

What’s even more interesting to me, are newer authors like John Scalzi, who will leave gender pronouns out—he did this with his book “Locked In”—and my mind defaulted to male-I had to read the book again to figure out why I did that. There was no real reason I could find.

Neil Gaiman has a racially ambiguous protagonist in “American Gods”—I figured he was half black due to
one reference to sickle cell disease.

[MineralMan]

18. Gender pronouns have always been a bugbear for me.

My tendency is to use plural forms in my writing, so I can use they and them as pronouns. In my magazine writing, I saw things shift to that method of ensuring gender neutrality over the past 50 years.

My solution to all sorts of knotty problems with usage has been to change my writing style rather than deal with them. By developing gender-neutral writing habits, I have saved myself a lot of time and stress. I'm very lazy, really.

Sometime, I'll describe how I forced Microsoft to fix its gender-biased thesaurus in Microsoft Word for Windows. It almost cost me my job at one magazine. I won, though.

[ismnotwasm]

21. I hope you do sometime That's sound great!

Merry Christmas and I hope you are having a good holiday, MineralMan

[MineralMan]

24. Here's the short version:

I did all the word processor reviews for one major PC user magazine, one with a couple million subscribers. One year, I was checking the thesaurus add-on in Word, and looked up some common words. One was "woman." I was surprised to find a long list of what they thought were synonyms for "woman." The list included mistress, secretary, dame, broad and several other words with negative connotations. So, I check the entries for "man." No such negative synonyms. "Girl" and "boy" produced similar discrepancies. Under "girl" I found chick, babe, and even the rare word "frail."

I called the Microsoft project manager for the application and brought this up with him. He poo-poohed my concerns and gave the excuse that the thesaurus was a third-party add-on and he couldn't do anything about it, "even if I wanted to." I said that the synonyms for "woman" and "girl" were going to piss off a lot of the application's users. He dismissed my concerns.

So, I called the thesaurus out in my review and used screen shots to demonstrate the problem. The magazine was happy to publish what I had found. The day after the review hit the stands, I got an angry call from that product manager, who threatened to get me fired for putting Microsoft in a bad light. I said, "Take your best shot," knowing that my editor and the publisher were fine with the article. He did contact them, and they told him to "push off," basically.

About two months later, after an update to the application, I checked again. All of the offensive synonyms were gone, leaving only basic synonyms for "woman" and "girl." That was back in 1995. The thesaurus is still the same as it was then, with all of the gender-bashing words gone. In fact, they've cleaned up the lists for a bunch of other words, as well.

I kept my job. Microsoft fixed the issue. Sometimes you win.

[mantis49]

30. Fascinating!

And good for you! As a woman, I appreciate it!

[localroger]

39. Good on ya, MineralMan!

That is a great an inspirational story. (For my part, my experience getting manufacturers to fix even bona fide "it don't work" technical problems is usually a hair-pulling nightmare. Maybe I need to start a magazine.)

[MineralMan]

46. Well, at the time, it still wasn't clear which word processing

software would become the most-used. WordPerfect was still in the hunt, as was a new program, Ami Professional. Wordstar was out of the running by then, though. So magazine reviews still carried a lot of weight with consumers, especially business consumers.

It gave reviewers for major publications enough heft that they could push the software companies to fix stuff they got wrong. Microsoft and I had a "complicated" relationship. I also reviewed other programs from Microsoft, so I looked at a lot of software and was an objective reviewer. While that time was short, only about 10 years, really, a few software reviewers really had an impact on features and usability for a lot of software. That ended when Microsoft became dominant in most areas of productivity software. I quit writing about computer software shortly after that and went on to do other things.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. Yes, that's all true.

But they'll take away my Oxford Comma when they pry it from my cold, dead, stiff hands. I also can't bear ever to split infinitives although I understand that's now allowed.

[moriah]

8. Commas save lives.

Could be a big thing, today, especially with all the eating and grandmas around.

[MineralMan]

11. It's not really such a big problem. Grandmothers are tough and hard to chew.

Or so I understand, anyhow.

[MineralMan]

14. I use the Oxford Comma selectively.

Normally, in a series, I omit the final comma, as long as the series is all in the same form. If I change the structure for the final element, I include the comma. I've been doing that, now, for almost 50 years. However, where a publication's style sheet requires them, I'll go along, or let the copy editor insert them.

Splitting infinitives, however, I've never seen as much of a problem. I normally don't do it, but there are times when inserting an adverb adds impact. Then, I simply ignore the prohibition. Again, I've been doing that for a very long time, without any complaints from editors.

At one of the magazines for which I was a columnist and contributing editor, I had an interesting relationship with the chief copy editor. She and I used to have long telephone conversations about my slightly unorthodox style. We became great friends. Not many people, apparently, enjoy a lively discussion about Oxford Commas and sentence fragments. Sometimes I won; sometimes she did.

[LoisB]

12. I wonder what happened to "led" and "pled".

[MineralMan]

16. I'm led to believe that pled is still correct usage.

However, some publications may insist on a different standard.

[bitterross]

13. When I was in High School we learned about Standard American English(Speech)

I was very fortunate to have some excellent teachers in my public school in nowhere TN.

I think it was in our etymology class we learned about Standard American English. One of the things I remember about the definition we had to commit to memory was that "standard" speech is speech at a period in time. That is, it is always evolving. As long as a language is in use it will evolve.

This is why we say Latin is a dead language. It is not in use commonly and no longer evolves. Which is one reason it was so often used in the past for scientific texts. The meanings of the words were not changing. It was not German, English, French, Italian, etc. that are still changing and have great variations over the regions in which they are spoken.

It wasn't until the 70's or so that the term "gay" took on the meaning homosexual. So one can see how the English language has evolved within our lifetime.

Now for my pet peeve! One of the things that most annoys me about this is the word "irregardless." It is not a word. If you check older dictionaries you will not find it. If you check the current edition of Merriam-Websters you will find it listed as slang. This means, sadly to me, it will probably, eventually enter our standard version of English and no longer be considered slang.

But, who am I to stand in the way of "progress?"

[MineralMan]

17. Some dictionaries are "prescriptive," while others are "descriptive."

New meanings and usages show up first in the latter type of dictionary. Usage will always win out in the end, though.

[bitterross]

20. You are correct. Usage will always win out.

That was one of the the things we were taught. It's true.

[treestar]

27. I think the nonsensical "try and" has become completely accepted.

You see it in print all the time now. If you try to do something, the trying is you are attempting to do it. To "try" with no object, "and" then do something, just means you are going to try (nothing) and then do something. How that came into being and to be preferred would be interesting to find out. Does it just sound better to most people for some reason? Along with "I'll help who's next." It must sound cooler to people than the proper way to say it. It is totally accepted at this point.

[3catwoman3]

29. "Irregardless" will always set my teeth...

...on edge, even if it eventually shows up as a acceptable usage in MMerriam-Webster or the OED.

[bitterross]

31. +infinity

I guess I'm just old and stuck in my ways!

[CTyankee]

47. I always say "irrespective." "Irregardless" is not in my lexicon. Never has been.

[Bucky]

22. I appreciate the Star Trek Easter eggs you dropped in this post

[bitterross]

32. Did you mean Star Wars?

"Do or do not. There is no 'try'" is what rang in for me.

[Bucky]

48. is there a difference?

[Hermit-The-Prog]

23. According to one of the great sages of our time,

Verbing weirds language.

-- Calvin
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

[bitterross]

33. LOL! Thank you! Totally laughed out loud.

I love Calvin anyway. That's a really good one.

[treestar]

25. True, and it was about that time they started to standardize

If you look at 18th-century newspapers, you will see them still using various spellings and capitalizing all of the nouns.

If you read 18th-century novels, you will see other spellings, too. Before the rise of the dictionary, people spelled things as they sounded.

[MineralMan]

26. Yes. by the middle of the 19th century, English became much

more standardized.

[bitterross]

35. Don't forget the old-fashioned long "s" that looks like "f"

There is that odd-looking - to us in these times - character that looks like an "f" in documents for the "long s."

http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2729

[treestar]

42. That's right!

You have to navigate that too when reading colonial newspapers and pamphlets as copies of the original.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1940575

]

And notice the spelling of almanac!

[kskiska]

34. Spelling only became relevant

with the invention of the printing press.

[bitterross]

36. Thanks for this thread. I so enjoy these things.

I loved, loved my etymology class and other English classes.

I have to assume that with the Internet and global commerce we will eventually end up with some sort of more common pidgin. The way I see in many SciFi post-apocalyptic stories and where the need is accelerated by the apocalypse.

The individual languages will still exist I'm sure.

[Hekate]

37. The worst to my ear was John Dean's Watergate testimony use of "impacted" to mean ...

..."To have an impact on." It always reminded me of a tooth that needed extracting.

We've lost that battle too.

I've been noticing for years that in newspapers Irregular verbs have been regularized to a great extent, alas.

[3catwoman3]

41. I cannot abide...

...”impactful.’” Just use influential, damnit!

[MineralMan]

44. Yes. To Impact has become a verb in regular use now.

I don't use it, but you can't escape hearing it.

My favorite word to hate these days is "fraught." People use it alone, as in "This is such a fraught situation." It is not an adjective, traditionally, but was always used along with the word "with," as in the situation was "fraught with suspense." Now, it has its own meaning as an adjective, but nobody seems to know what it actually means.

There are so many. But, I'm a usage guy. Once something becomes part of the language, I can live with it. I might as well, because I can't change it.

[localroger]

40. There are a lot of words, especially homonyms, being clearly misused

Last I looked "reign" still clearly meant "to rule over" and "rein" was that thing you use to guide the horse. Yet I see them used interchangeably, by professional writers who are getting paid and supposedly being edited, sometimes by the same author in the same article, all the time.

[chaplainM]

43. Please wait until I'm dead...

..before accepting "literally" as a synonym for "figuratively."

[oberliner]

45. Thank you for this post

Important and useful information for folks to consider.