"Definately" is not a word! (1 Viewer)

[Ron-P]

BTW, anyone else long for the days when the HTF included a spell checker??? Uhtrocity's lyke thees kud be prevented!

Umm, Dennis, the spell checker is there, look to the right of the 'Submit Reply' and 'Reset Form' icons.
Peace Out~

 

[RobertR]

anyone else long for the days when the HTF included a spell checker???

Um, at the bottom of the page I'm on as I write this, there IS a spell checker.

 

[Ron-P]

three in a row, bet you don't miss it now Dennis.
Peace Out~

 

[Jack Briggs]

Wow! Four engineers and a physicist in the same thread! I'm a professional writer and editor, and the subject of this thread is sort of how I make my living. Anybody impressed?

 

[MickeS]

So explain the use of "would of" to me. Do these people not know that "would've" is just an abbreviation of "would have"? Or do they know and purposely decide to write it as "would of" (a phrase that doesn't, sorry, I mean "does ent", even make sense)?

/Mike

 

[Dennis Reno]

LOL, how the hell could I not see that??? :b

Talk about being oblivious! I feel like a co-worker who was looking for his glasses. He was wearing them!

 

[ChadM]

For the record, I know it is FOUR not FOR!

Just making a joke....

 

[RobertR]

I'm a professional writer and editor

Sigh. I wish we could clone you and make the clones the science editors for the various news outlets, Jack. We NEED to counteract the appalling scientific ignorance and lack of skepticism that's rampant among journalists.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

TheoGB wrote:

You're confusing the content of speech with the form of expression. My comments speak to the form of expression, not the content of any given utterance. I hate to tell you, but logic has little to do with how people talk, as opposed to what they say.

It's like saying that using double negatives to express negativity is "illogical". Well, Chaucer is famous for topping out at four negatives in a given example to express negativity. Some elite has set this rule at some point in the history of English, yet still speakers break the "rule". Why? And other languages have no problem with it, and in fact it is often mandatory. In Russian, for example, one regularly uses multiple negaives to express negativity. Are the Russians "dumb", or "illogical"?

To the linguist all that matters is that native speakers of a language can understand each other, despite dialect differences or "social registers" (class-based language differences, often consciously expressed). If I say "I ain't got no apples", we're both speakers of English and you can understand what I said, no matter how appalled you might be by how I've said it. To linguists, the people who study language as "scientifically" as it gets studied, that's all that counts. Anything else is a value judgment, and not scientific.

 

[TheoGB]

Rex, my comments about logic referred to your snipe about us being "scientists". There is nothing 'unscientific' about what we are discussing.
I also objected to your tone when I was really being pretty lighthearted. I am perfectly aware that spelling was not uniform 500 years ago, however, the printing press is only a little older. I would think that we have tried to make the written word uniform for a good reason - that it makes our lives easier.
Now, indeed there are words that sound the same and are spelled differently because it makes the meaning of the sentence clearer...but surely that's precisely the point.
Whereas while one can argue that 'definately' can only have one meaning, it still seems logical to me to keep to the spelling.
The point is that speaking and writing are different.

BTW TheoGB there is no such word as "arse" the correct word in this instance would be "ass"!

I know you know I'm from the UK, Marianne, so I'll just ignore that one, shall I? Heh heh...

 

[KeithH]

Jack said:

I'm a professional writer and editor, and the subject of this thread is sort of how I make my living. Anybody impressed?

Nope.

 

[David Von Pein]

Has anybody touched on this one, that most people say incorrectly ? ........
"I could care less."
This is wrong. Should be "I couldn't care less." Because if you COULD care less, you would!

 

[RobertR]

Has anybody touched on this one,

Yep. It was extensively covered in a thread.

 

[Jack Briggs]

Oooh!

 

[KeithH]

David said:

This is wrong. Should be "I couldn't care less." Because if you COULD care less, you would!

Maybe some people could care less if they had more time. In other words, with more time, they might be in position to actually care less. People tend to care too much when pressed for time.

 

[Julie K]

"I could care less."

This is wrong.

Which is why I used it as I did in my earlier mispelled and ungrammatical joke post.

 

[TheoGB]

ARSE!
Just for Marianne.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

I thought he meant "defiantly":b

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Mike Broadman wrote:

Chinese[/I]]Quote:

A different, but similar, case. I dare say, most of the population you speak of outside of Israel does not speak Hebrew as a native tongue, a first language. Therefore, to communicate in Hebrew (which itself was dead outside of liturgical usage until it was revived by Jews determined to revive their cultural heritage in one place---a remarkable and unique achievement, I might add), one needs to have a great grasp of the written tongue. These people, then, although they may learn Hebrew as a second language, are not properly "Hebrew-speaking".
And none of this changes my central point at all. In order for there to be a "written language" to use for any purpose there must first be, or have been, a spoken language. Writing as we know it presupposes, and is utterly dependent on, meaningful vocal utterance (human speech!). On the other hand, there is no reciprocal relationship of speech to writing. Speech is the language and does not in any way depend on writing (which is not to say that speech cannot be affected by writing.) Writing proper is not language itself, but a highly imperfect medium that attempts to communicate language. The language standardized under any given writing system is necessarily more conservative, stilted, and less flexible than ordinary, everyday language, and therefore doesn't reflect the multiplicities of change that constantly go on in large speech communities through time. That's both an advantage and a disadvantage to communication. (That's why, for example, the churches in the US are mostly "updating" the Bible these days so that it is "alive" and "accessible" (understandable) to today's parishioners.)
Speech has primacy over any kind of writing. Period.
And, just to get this straight: If someone had written "definishly" or the like for "definitely", that would be very different. And I would have no problem with the statement: "that's not a word". But a minor spelling error that in no way affects the real pronunciation in the speaker's dialect? Huh, forget it!

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Quote:



As long as they know where to use them naturally in context, there's no "grammatical" error.






MickeS wrote:


Quote:



So explain the use of "would of" to me. Do these people not know that "would've" is just an abbreviation of "would have"?






"Would of" is a mispelling of "would've". You may not believe this, but, as people write less and less, spelling is getting worse and worse. Mine's certainly gotten much worse over the years. Yes, they do know that would've is a contraction of would have, and any careful elicitation technique should draw that response from them. Would've is transparent, that is, it is analyzable by native speakers as being comprised of two morphemes (word forms): would + have. 've, like 're (< are) in they're or there're ("There're five fingers on my hand."), 's (< us) (as in let's) or 's (< is) (as in it's) or 's (< has) (as in he's: "He's gone and done it now."), 't (< it) as in 'tis, 'im/'em (< him/them), 'er (< her) (as in "Let'er rip!"), 'd ( = [uhd] < would) (as in "That'd be great."), ya or just y' (< you) (as in "Whaddya think?") etc., is what linguists call a clitic form: an alternative form (in English, at least) of a pronoun, verb, or preposition in certain unstressed positions that "leans on" (= is appended to) what follows it ("proclitic") or what proceeds it ("enclitic"). In regular speech we use them all the time. Many languages have them (e.g., Spanish del = d' (< de) + el) They are in no way inferior to---functionally they convey no less and no different information from---their full-bodied, stressed alternate forms.

Writing, being conservative, doesn't always reflect these kinds of pronunciation differences, even ones within the standard, "approved" dialect. Note pronunciation differences between clitic the [thuh](as in "The man walked by."), and stressed [thee] (as in "Dealin' Dave is the man to see if you want a great bargain! Come on down!"). Same function, different pronunciation, just like with the pronouns and the verb forms above.


Quote:



Or do they know and purposely decide to write it as "would of" (a phrase that doesn't, sorry, I mean "does ent", even make sense)?






First let me make this clear, because it does not seem to be widely understood. Grammatical processes are not conscious. They're like an autonomic language system. (You don't consciously breathe, you just do it!) Of course, when asked to think about it, speakers can reflect on how they produce their speech---as Mr. GB said he did with the word in question---, although not always with the clarity and decisiveness of result that the inquirer may wish to get out the query. To get to your question specifically, it's just a mispelling, since the form 've, as pronounced, has become a homophone ('exact sound-alike') of the (itself usually unstressed) preposition of. Each could be represented phonetically with the string [uhv], 'cause they sound alike! I repeat, it's just a mispelling! (I've done it myself when typing fast.) When this word combo is pronounced aloud the deviant spelling in no way affects other native speakers' understanding of what the speaker means. Therefore, it is not a grammatical error. No rule of grammar ( = the set of rules that lets any speaker produce understandable strings of meaningful speech units in his own language) was violated in this example. You folks are confusing writing+spelling (orthographic rules) with language grammar. How people actually talk is their grammar ---and linguists try to describe this with formal rules ("descriptive grammar") and how it changes across space, class, and/or time---, while the set of ways in which an elite tells speakers they ought to talk and/or write is called "prescriptive grammar". The latter has nothing to do with science. It is a force of social control.

The grammar of one dialect of a language will not be exactly the same as the grammar of a different dialect of that same language. A good example of dialectal divergence: people from the upper Midwest US have told me they can and do say "Thats all the farther I can go" to mean what in SAE (Standard American English) would be "That's as far as I can go". I'd never heard it before, but they tell me it works for them. What can you do? Condemn them all as stupid "rubes"?

Some here seem to think that I'm somehow arguing against formal standards for formal language, which is nonsense. I'm arguing that speech, not writing, is language, and that, at best, a written standard language is only one of several dialects---and it is usually an artificial one imposed by a ruling elite for its own benefit---of a given language, and whatever its "rules" are, they are anything but set in stone. What other dialects offer their various speakers is equally valid for their communication (if not always for written communication intended to be cross-dialectal).

It's hard for many to reckon with, yet alone make peace with, a world of diversity, but such is the real world. There's often no "ONE right way" to achieve a given end (in this case, communication). Get used to it.