Word Replacement Rant
Community Forums/General Help/Word Replacement Rant
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| I do find myself annoyed recently with perfectly good english words being replaced by American generalities for no reason other than it's easier for businesses if we are all homogenised (note this word is spelt correctly but IE disagrees even with my language set to UK). Here are the ones that are currently really annoying me: Replacement of the words: shop, boutique, market, outlet with the universal American "Store". We are not on a frontier, we store things in warehouses and similar buildings. We SELL things in SHOPS. Replacement of the words: clever, incisive, intellectual, adept, wise and many others; with the US dumbed down, "smart". Why do you have to make language so lazy and dull ?!? Replacement of the words: happy, joyful, contented, elated or convivial with the universal "good". As in, "I'm good or "It's all good". For goodness sake, welcome some variety into your vocabulary! It all seems to come down to making everything as simple and dull as possible so as to require the littlest possible thought. Please stop this madness! Darkheart |
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| The irony is these are widely used in the USA and extremely common. Makes me wonder what the decline in your society is where you are no longer using these words and dumbing everything down. They say if you want to know where America will be 10 years from now, just look at where Britian is now, So, I guess in 10 years we will be following the intellectual regression of your society. |
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| It's hard to really put a label on 'Proper English'. The language has always evolved and developed subsets for specific areas and situations. The things you describe are just some of the hallmarks of 'Internet English'. However, having just said that... ;o) The things that currently grate, include: "It's addicting" - This has caused many a flamewar and none can, seemingly, agree on it status. It's just sounds *so* wrong. "It's very fun" - Don't...Just don't "I could care less" - Surely you couldn't care less!? [edit]I'm not the only one, it seems. =oD[/edit] It makes me want to give someone a *very* stern look. [edit] Is there a word for when the word irony is used ironically? A Morisetteism, perhaps? [/edit] |
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| I must admit, that at heart I am pretty anal about language (though my typing seems intent on disagreeing) I am especially aggrieved (and I honestly don't quite know why it irks me so much) that the US lexicon includes having "bunches" of all sorts of nouns, even those that don't actually come in bunches, ever. Or how durations don't last from one time /date until another time/date, but simply this time thru that time. Is that inclusive? Shouldn;t there at least be a 'to' in there somewhere? I've heard American police officers talk of how a man was "burglarized" and could only assume that this was the moment one turns to crime. Do people actually rest in restrooms? Admittedly, there's not always a bath in a bathroom I was supposed to meet an American friend once, they hadn't shown up at the appointed time, so I called them on the 'phone, and they told me they were "waiting on a train". Although I was disappointed that they would be late, I was glad to hear they had what sounded like a nice job. In the 'States, one can have their house "weatherized" at a cost. In England, we have weather (and lots of it!) for free. I used to smoke (I quit about 9 months ago now, so doing well!) but it wasn't until I was in the company of some American friends that I realised just how often and easily I would say "I'm just going to nip out for a fag", and how, even after weeks, they weren't so used to hearing such a phrase. In true response to the OP, regarding dumbing down, there was an actual decision for the United States, in seeking and attaining independence, that they would have a simple (as in easy, not stupid ;) ) language. It's true that English has possibly got far too many words, even. This is also why 'z' (Zed, not Zee!)replaced 's' and 'u' was dropped and other such 'foibles' introduced into the language the Americans use. One thing I've often found more curious than annoying is that 'jerk' (short for 'jerk-off' which can again be short for 'one that jerks off' where jerk is a verb synonymous with performing an act of physical, sexual onanism - Is extremely common in the United States, (and has spread well thanks to TV and movies :) ) despite it's crude connotations, there doesn't seem to be any problems with it and web forums with word filters (Waste of time, really) that filter such words as "gay", "idiot" and "bitch" for some reason, are not at all configured to bother with "jerk"s. What really suprises me, though, is that, as being from the UK where the word w*nker is really one of those swear words that you just can't say in polite conversation (at least, not polite enough to still say sh1t, bl0ody etc.). It's just not nice. Maybe the British (That's English, Scottish, Welsh, the populations of Isle Of Man, those crown dependencies now considered BOT and Gibraltar etc.) are just more prudish, but then we do seem to say "Bugger" a lot more than I believe Americans do, and this is used almost as carefreely as "jerk" is by the Americans, despite it's meaning... There's definitely a lot of horrible atrocities on language, not just English, but possibly every language (except perhaps French... Internet and slang Francais seems to be extremely long winded with properly spelled words that I have seen!) that has become a staple of the internet in some of its less refined 'corners'. ;) I don't know whether some of these are just convenience/laziness or that sort of "on-purpose mockery" such as "pwnage" (I refer here to the use of 'p' as a purposeful mistyping of 'o'. There's no excuses for silly words like "ownage"!) Speaking of which, the word "own" in that sense actually comes from assumed prison slang adopted by some to imply someone's sexual plaything. Really not very nice is it? Now there's children as young as ten, possibly younger using it in every day speech. The same can be said for "sucks" or "blows" equivalently both of which implies fellatio but apparently as a bad thing. I will admit, those words have been bastardised and bandied around much longer than the internet and I'm sure there'll be more to come... {I posted the same David Mitchell YouTube Link because I didn't realise Yan already linked it!} ____ But.. having said all the above, and mostly it was tongue in cheek and hopefully more amusing than offending anyone - I'm much more tolerant and leess caring nowadays. We live in times of global communication, where US English is extremely common, albeit smattered with a bunch (see what I did there?) of words from German, Korean and even Afrikaans as a result of popular cuoltural influence on the web - Perhaps in the future, the global language will be a bizarre digital-age Esperanto rendition of 'textspeak' combining languages of India, China, English and wherever else! About ten years ago now, I was working in a Further Ed College, and read an interesting article in the TES written by some top professor of "English Language" at Oxford who basically praised the evolution of language that was apparent with "Text-Speak" and the shorthand used because it represented more efficient and widely understood communication. Although I still had my doubts about it, thinking that the core of English had to be learned properly (i.e. one needs to know the difference/meaning of too, to or two before being able to properly understand the context of "2" in a phrase such as "Gon 2 wrk. pub 2. bbl" ("[I've]Gone to work, [then the] pub too. [I'll] be back later.") ) - yet at least, this lady's article did open my eyes somewhat and I can appreciate at least, that language really isn't (and shouldn't be) a static thing. Not only are words being invented and unuse all the time, but the very structure and method of communication too. |
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| And where is it you need general help? Smart! lol |
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| Somebody posted a language thing that was going around Facebook a few days back, saying how stupid the English language was. It finished off by saying "there is no egg in eggplant". Which itself, is an Americanism, because the English call it an aubergine, not an eggplant, as we know eggs do not grow on plants - they fall out of chicken's bums. So, umm.... yeah. I'm sure I had a point when I started typing this. |
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| There are lots of differences in the way we use English between the US and the UK. I find many of them funny at times, but it never really bothers me. The only one that really bothers me is how you UK guys put an "R" sound on the ends of words that do not end in R. Drives me crazy. I watch a lot of international soccer (ha another difference, football) and the announcers do that quite often. Oh yeah, "maths" with an "S" on the end. That bothers me a bit, too. We consider the word math to be the abbreviation of mathematics with no s. |
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| Two nations divided by a common language. |
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| The only one that really bothers me is how you UK guys put an "R" sound on the ends of words that do not end in R. They also drop the final R sound from words. I used to have a friend who claimed this was a "conservation of Rs" law, like the physical conservation of momentum. English works well as an international language largely because it is understandable even when mangled. The examples in this thread are typical. They may be annoying but don't interfere with communication. |
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| English..... the spoken equivalent of LINUX..... One kernel too many distributions. |
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| I really don't think it's fair for the OP to blame the US for other people's inability to use a thesaurus. I'm pretty sure "good" isn't an Americanism: if it were, we would never have been able to give them "doubleplusungood". With language as in all things, if you want something done properly, do it yourself. "English" is not being dumbed down as long as my private copy of the language is kept properly maintained. I don't much care for anyone else's version; I don't use most of those. If you want your own version to spread and become popular (/again), write something worth reading and repeating, and lead by example. You can't very well enforce rules with no obvious justifications. (Lord knows if I followed my instinctive urge to punch the RP back into every Estuary-speaker's stupid ******* "maaf", I'd hardly have advanced that cause very far, would I?) Broken spellcheckers are a legitimate complaint, but if you set the language to UK English and it still highlights correct spellings as erroneous, that's exactly (and only) what it is: a broken piece of software. The dictionary describes the language; it doesn't define it, and a useless dictionary is not by itself a corruption of the language, even if it contributes to that in the long run. If it can't do its only job, file a bug report. English..... the spoken equivalent of LINUX..... One kernel too many distributions. HAHAHAHAHA yes. |
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| I'm going to step up and defend "I could care less", even though I'd never say it (and neither would anyone else outside of America). I used to think it made no sense, but it does -- as in "yeah, that bothers me, but I suppose I *could* care less" (as in, some things would bother me even more). I think that's the logic, anyway. |
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| I'm always confused as to why the last letter 'i' in 'aluminium' is invisible to Americans. |
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| Some words like Aluminium are "mispronounced" by both sides as it was first sent just as a word, no pronunciation guide, I had no idea what Aloominum was when a character in a movie said it. Vee hick ill that one is harder on the ears. My beef is how programming languages never factored in the English spelling of words like Colour and Centre, instead I have to intentionally misspell or use a work around. "When did cocksucker become a bad man? It's a good woman." George Carlin. |
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| My beef is how programming languages never factored in the English spelling of words like Colour... Now there I use colour in conversation, color in programming - less typing ;) |
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| My beef is how programming languages never factored in the English spelling of words like Colour and Centre It helps if you mentally file programming languages under a separate mental category from natural languages, and simply recognise that "color" is Blitz-eignian for the word "colour". Speakers of other languages have to do this for pretty much every keyword anyway, so... (realising this is one of the things that made me start to lean against overuse of keywords in programming: it's not actually English, so why make it look like it except to mislead? Also because IDEs auto-capitalising keywords starts to look like Speak Loudly And Slowly For The Computer Natives). |
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| True I've got it easy compared to a language that might not even use the Latin alphabet. Also helps that I have not coded in such a long time that it's not really an issue per say. |
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| A side street artist has a table with 3 cups turn upside down on it. A crowd gathers and the artist tells them he is gong to do a demonstration of languages using the 3 cups as props. So pointing at the cups one after the other he says... 'In English we have one cup, two cups and three cups' 'In German it's Eins,Zwei,Drei' 'In Spain they would say Uno,Dros,Tres' 'An American would say There's one, there's another one, and there's another one' :) It's funny that you started a topic on this as I rebelled against becoming an 'American speller' late last year. I'm English and I choose to use the language that I was taught in school. Kind of on-topic and specific to the internet is how I see a lot of English speaking people reply to non English people with an abrupt attitude of telling the non-English person to learn English!! What's that all about?? |
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| Spoken language wise, I've found quite a few English learners to use almost queens English as books do not go too far into regional dialects if ever, that and most English for X are probably written with American English in mind or American authors. I had a supervisor that had been in England for over 30 years, but I swear she spoke like the hooker from full metal jacket, she was talking to a newish co worker who spoke better English than she did but dumbing it down for his 'benefit' I just said "He's polish not stupid" |
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| Gfk wrote: I'm always confused as to why the last letter 'i' in 'aluminium' is invisible to Americans. Gfk, we spell that word without the second i. So, it is invisible, because it is not there. "Aluminum". http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aluminum?s=t |
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| But...... that's wrong! :D |
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| AMOS / AMOS professional on the Amiga used 'colour' instead of 'colour' in it's command set. Having grown up outside of English speaking territories, to me American English sounds more natural than British English... Although I'm sure that a good chunk of that is do having more exposure to it thanks to the massive US movie industry. To my ears, there's plenty of British words that sound downright ridiculous, like 'boffin' for example. As far as Aluminium / Aluminum is concerned: That one is weird because the person who discovered and named it actually changed his mind about the name several times. First he called it Alumium, theb Aluminum, and finally Aluminium. Different versions of the name 'stuck' in different regions. It's not just pronounced different in the US vs. UK, but also spelled different. More info: http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm |
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| So many of these annoy me, especially 'i could care less'. The only one I can think of that I don't mind is 'light x on fire' instead of 'set x on fire'. First time I came across the term was a youtube video where someone had made a lighter for Garry's Mod (a Halflife 2 mod). Use it myself now just because it amuses me. |
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| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StJ-OK4jiSY |
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| My beef is how programming languages never factored in the English spelling of words like Colour... Now there I use colour in conversation, color in programming - less typing ;) Even now I still make the mistake and have to look twice when I get compile errors because I've tried to call a function named something- 'colour' etc. I used to think it made no sense, but it does -- as in "yeah, that bothers me, but I suppose I *could* care less" (as in, some things would bother me even more). I think that's the logic, anyway. I've heard it 'justified' (by Americans) as being "I could care less, but I have no desire to." But this really doesn't work, since it's still suggesting that there is an amount of "caring" applied to the situation - whereas the English version of "couldn't care less" clearly maintains that the absolute minimum level of caring has been reached! |
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| "could care less" is just people using it incorrectly. Nothing more, nothing less. Just like "mute" instead of "moot". |
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