h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sorry to interupt but the question `is the adjective Blond/Blonde gender sensitive to the noun to which it`s aplied?` would seem like a great one to start a punch up as a tie breaker at the end of a pub quiz

spook

O.K. My copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary dated 1962 and running to over 2500 pages of A4 with small print, states:
Blond, blonde. Rivived as French in 17th.century; whence the final e when applied to a woman. A. adj. Prop.(of the hair):Light auburn; loosly, light-coloured, fair. B. A person with blond hair; one with `fair` hair and complexion; esp. a woman, in which case spelt blonde 1822.

This conversation reminds me of the chapter in Gulliver's Travels when two countries went to war over which end of a boiled again should be opened to eat it. Swift lives!

1. A boiled what?

2. I am not naif, if anything I am naive. And my maiden name I prefix with née and before I was married I was someone's fiancée. All of which are things that no man can claim to.

3. As for the origin of genders, Jack Naples has some really good theories and explanations on that. WHERE ARE YOU JACK WHEN WE NEED YOU?

Can someone help me find it - was it an entry on its own or was it a topic in the Brit Eng Thread?

Where's that index when you need it, eh?

Sorry about that, it was a boiled egg

Shouldn't that previous post have been in the "Punchline to your favourite joke" thread?

I din't know, but it sure made this thread look a bit surreal

Yes, good idea! Maybe it could be a melting smiley going over the edge of a table.

I just read this entertaining thread, but I have to say that in my opinion "naif" is absolutely unjustifiable, an intolerable genteelism - horrible.
And who needs it anyway? The word is either naive or, perhaps even better, artless.
As for "If that's what people do, then that's proper English", all I can say that there are more than enough "good-enoughers" slopping around already without needing any extra encouragement. Do you really believe "Inglish is kinda like wot it am spoked"?
Take for example "She loves him more than me". On the face of it, she loves him more than she loves me, but often enough it will be used to mean she loves him more than I do - can ambiguity (actually downright carelessness) be justified by usage?
May I suggest an old but nevertheless informative (frequently amusing) book "Usage and Abusage" by Eric Partridge....

Talking of ambiguity I remember my primary school headmaster talking to the top class about punctuation.

He wrote on the blackboard:
The boy said the teacher is a fool.

We all laughed at this apparent cheeky comment.

He then punctuated it

"The boy," said the teacher, "is a fool,"

Very clever

naive. so blah

naive. so blah

Doogyman, I think we have it right here. The more civilized we become the simpler our language becomes. Some things we have "evolved" into accepting as the norm and it is not necessary to discuss them. Earlier "civilization" were always trying to get their peer opinions accepted and thus there was a lot of talking.

As we have progressed some discussions are no longer necessary, or only occasionally.
Eventually there should be no speech necessary, at all. Our simple presence should emote the required response. It can happen already in our lives......while we are making LOVE. Now who is going to tell me that they do not know how to make LOVE?

If that's about what I think it's about, then it's saying that language will eventually become obsolete because we shall be communicating by telepathy. Which is great, because I have always maintained that I don't think in a language, but in concepts, which I then have to parse into a language to communicate it to others. So if we miss out that second step we shall reduce misunderstandings and causes for aggression throught the world and achieve World peace near as dammit.

Does anyone else agree that we think in concepts? The reason I got on to this idea was because in a book I read about bilingual children, it said that bilingual children generally had a higher vocabulary level than their monolingual counterparts IF you added the concepts together that they knew in both languages.

So while teachers were comparing these kids to others in just one of the languages they were coming to the conclusion that the kids were less educated because their vocabulary was smaller than that of their monolingual peers. However, there was a not insignificant group of concepts and words that the children did know, but because they were in the other language, the teacher couldn't test them on that.

And one important question raised by this utopian ideal of communicating in concepts, desirable as it is - what would the written word look like?

language cannot get too simple. verbosity doesnt allow it.

english is grammatically simple, but its vocabulary is vast. it has synonyms.