Entry tags:
languagemorphs
I was in a discussion the other day on Mastodon with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol and some other people about language.
Soph was pointing out that they're hearing and seeing a lot of people using the pronoun "I" instead of "me" in situations like, "They gave it to Mary and I." Which is, from a prescriptivist perspective, wrong! And it sounds wrong to my ears. But I hear people using it all the time (I would say especially in the southern US), to the point that I think we're somewhere on the slope that leads to it being a widely accepted alternate use.
We ended up talking about how I am now a descriptivist (I care about how language is actually used by actual people to communicate with other actual people) and not a prescriptivist (I no longer care much about what's in the grammar books or what is technically correct), but there's a big caveat to that. What I care about is can your audience understand you? The more narrow and niche your audience is, the more out there you can be with your grammar and syntax. The wider, more diverse, and less personal your audience is, the more you need to at least try to hew towards the standard rules. So there's a huge difference in what I say to friends on Tumblr (I love to speak internet! It makes me happy!) and how I would communicate the exact same thing if I was, say, writing a letter to the editor.
Right now, we're in transition times where people still can use literally...er, literally and you can mostly tell whether someone is by tone, context, etc. We're also at the beginning of that transition period with the use of "me" in plural forms in situations like objects of prepositions, etc. People will still keep pushing back against that, but imo, once I start to notice something, it's probably too late to turn that train back around. Because of inertia, it'll keep chugging in the same direction despite all the grammarians running after it telling it to turn around. *sigh* The way words are used always trumps the way words are supposed to be used. (And of course there's loads of class and race stuff going on in all of this that makes it all complicated, but that's the subject of another post.)
Still, just because I think it's more useful to talk about what language does than what language should be doesn't mean I don't have opinions! There are language shifts that I can't do anything about, but that I still dislike. (And others that I like--I think we're finally reaching the point where the singular they is being more widely accepting, which is great since we've only been using it for centuries and centuries!)
So I was thinking about which grammar or words that have changed and which ones bother me the most. My selection for biggest loss: literally, which I see used as an intensifier ("It was literally so cold outside!" and even--in extreme cases--like, "It was literally a million degrees outside!" when they mean...figuratively) to the extent that I think the word's literal meaning is totally lost (thankfully, the adjectival form seems okay). Which I think is a big loss, because in a world of increasing lies and misinformation, we really need words that emphasize veracity and reality.
What shifts in language are you seeing? How do you feel about them?
sophia_sol and some other people about language.Soph was pointing out that they're hearing and seeing a lot of people using the pronoun "I" instead of "me" in situations like, "They gave it to Mary and I." Which is, from a prescriptivist perspective, wrong! And it sounds wrong to my ears. But I hear people using it all the time (I would say especially in the southern US), to the point that I think we're somewhere on the slope that leads to it being a widely accepted alternate use.
We ended up talking about how I am now a descriptivist (I care about how language is actually used by actual people to communicate with other actual people) and not a prescriptivist (I no longer care much about what's in the grammar books or what is technically correct), but there's a big caveat to that. What I care about is can your audience understand you? The more narrow and niche your audience is, the more out there you can be with your grammar and syntax. The wider, more diverse, and less personal your audience is, the more you need to at least try to hew towards the standard rules. So there's a huge difference in what I say to friends on Tumblr (I love to speak internet! It makes me happy!) and how I would communicate the exact same thing if I was, say, writing a letter to the editor.
Right now, we're in transition times where people still can use literally...er, literally and you can mostly tell whether someone is by tone, context, etc. We're also at the beginning of that transition period with the use of "me" in plural forms in situations like objects of prepositions, etc. People will still keep pushing back against that, but imo, once I start to notice something, it's probably too late to turn that train back around. Because of inertia, it'll keep chugging in the same direction despite all the grammarians running after it telling it to turn around. *sigh* The way words are used always trumps the way words are supposed to be used. (And of course there's loads of class and race stuff going on in all of this that makes it all complicated, but that's the subject of another post.)
Still, just because I think it's more useful to talk about what language does than what language should be doesn't mean I don't have opinions! There are language shifts that I can't do anything about, but that I still dislike. (And others that I like--I think we're finally reaching the point where the singular they is being more widely accepting, which is great since we've only been using it for centuries and centuries!)
So I was thinking about which grammar or words that have changed and which ones bother me the most. My selection for biggest loss: literally, which I see used as an intensifier ("It was literally so cold outside!" and even--in extreme cases--like, "It was literally a million degrees outside!" when they mean...figuratively) to the extent that I think the word's literal meaning is totally lost (thankfully, the adjectival form seems okay). Which I think is a big loss, because in a world of increasing lies and misinformation, we really need words that emphasize veracity and reality.
What shifts in language are you seeing? How do you feel about them?
no subject