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

What's to stop someone from making up a word and putting into circulation? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. That is, after all, where we got most of our words... someone either stole it from a foreign language, or made it up on the spot. A modern example is the word "wannabe," which circulates throughout America. It was introduced by Madonna, in an interview, when talking about performers who were imitating her. It fills a gap in the English language, it's catchy, and her wide audience ensured that it spread fast. You'll find it in the dictionary (although I found it as wanna-be).

shakespeare is responsible for an awful lot of the english language. i can't think of an example right now...but there are quite a few...
^. .^
= ' =

"super" as a prefix - as in "super-subtle Venetian" regarding Desdemona in 'Othello'. There are lots more I can't think of at the moment.

I couldn't think of any off the top of my head either, but luckily I've got a copy of "Coined by Shakespeare" in front of me... "from academe to zany", it says here.

I'll admit that my spelling and grammar leave a lot to be desired, but at least I make some effort. I can also understand people wish to keep conversations flowing, but I think that if they're having trouble keeping up with the flow of conversation, they should learn to type. I forced myself to learn to type faster because I didn't want to shrink my sentences down to garbage such as "y u wanna go 2 the mall? we cud stay rite here". I can type a pretty decent speed now, and that is because I forced myself to not give in, and use the garbage that doesn't resemble anything but random letters and numbers, and I forced myself to type out what I wanted to say, and I may have not always kept up with the conversations at first, but in the long run, I am much better off!

In real time conversations, I am not as picky about catching my typos, because I want to keep up the flow, but when I'm typing something that I will most likely have to be looking at again and again, I will make an effort to go through and proof read what I can. I even sometimes go to the extent as to run spell check on words I'm not sure about, or asking some of my friends who happen to be better at spelling than I am. I do read a lot, so I have picked up a wider vocabulary than a lot of my peers at school, and even though my grades don't reflect it, I have been mistaken for being older, and smarter than the average American in my age group (17 at the moment), and even though my spelling leaves a lot to be desired, I usually can come up with synonyms to hide it.

I have also realize that my grammar has improved extensively since 9th grade, when I started taking German. A lot of Americans don't see the point of being billigual unless they want into a 4 year college, and I also know that my German teacher had to teach the class some English grammar before she could teach us the same thing in German, because our English teachers (as a majority) do not teach us half of what we need to know anymore. This year (my last year of high school) I finally got a good english teacher who tries to encourage us to expand our vocabulary, who gives us written tests instead of multiple choice tests (how stupid is that? multiple choice tests for an english class!) and would teach us correct grammar, and such, but this is a Science Fiction Literature class, and grammar isn't the focus of the class, it's something that my teacher shouldn't have to be correcting in our written assignments.

I had an english class where I was told to write a story, but then I was handed a format I had to follow (practically a fill in the blancks load of bull!) and when I turned in my finished project, I got it back with a comment saying "Nice story, but didn't quite follow the format" I had thought that I followed the format, I just didn't hit the reader in the face with it, like everyone else in the class did. It was some heroic journey crap, and I had to go through all these steps such as "The call" "Crossing the threshold" and I'm sure if I could remember what all the stupid steps were, I could go through the story, and put big bright arrows pointing at where each step was. English class is not supossed to focus on following molds, and interpreting the same tired stories in the same way as the teachers decided they were to interpreted 50 years ago. It should be about teaching us to use our own language so we can better communicate with others. It seems like those who learn English as a second language speak it better than those of us who grew up speaking it. It's scary to think that the natice speakers can not use it nearly as well as those who learn it as a second language and focus on it

I believe I might have gone on a little too long, and probably have gone off on a tangent, so I'll apologise for that. Hope I haven't bothered anyone too much.

Saturn Girl

Saturn Girl - your comments warmed my heart. And I read every word - not a bit too long!

I hope you will become an English teacher - better still, someone who teaches English teachers. Especially as the next generation will not only have less incentive or guidelines to teach grammar, but as they will, themselves, possibly not have learnt it at school.

Learning another language does help you understand your own. Awareness of other languages brings with it an awareness of other cultures - which again may encourage you to stand back and look at your own culture critically and analytically. All of which is fascinating stuff.

We have only been in a situation where the need and the wherewithal to express ourselves accurately with our language has been available for a couple of centuries, so let's hope the computer age doesn't take us backwards a few steps.

Computer languages have to be super-precise and unambiguous, but the people who use them often have no idea how to use everyday language as a tool.

The idea that words can have nuances, and that syntax and choice of words can bend and colour the meaning of a sentence is alien to most scientific people, which explains why only they could come up with the concept of translating by computer.

Having translated loads of stuff written by engineers and technicians, I know what I'm talking about. And to get back to your original point about insufficient awareness of language due to lack of teaching, these people are often not even capable of constructing a complete sentence, let alone expressing their concepts in a way that an outsider (even with the same education) would understand.

Oh - and I got waylaid while writing that. I also wanted to say that, although you think you did better than the teacher had asked in that test, sometimes it is better to go back one stage and go through the steps more obviously.

It's the same in arithmetic. It's frustrating to watch a little kid laboriously working out a sum and writing down all the little stages, when you would already have got to the answer in your head, but the kid *needs* to see this structure to enable it to do the whole thing in its head without thinking about the intermediate stages later on.

I also see this with my children (3 boys around your age) who grew up in Germany speaking English, and who then had to go to school and learn English as if it was a foreign language. Sometimes they know a better way of answering a question, but they often lose points because of this, as they should really go through all the stages of learning (for the benefit of the rest of the class)

Eventually they will come round full circle to speaking English the way they always have, but by then they will have a better awareness of how it works, and how it relates to the German they speak as well. The teacher seems to be keeping them back, but it is an advantage in the long run, and fortunately they are intelligent enough to realise the differences between the language we speak at home and the somewhat stilted English they are learning at school.

So perhaps your teacher was trying - for the benefit of the majority of the class - to show how a story should be structured. Be patient!

Of course, she also may simply have been trying to make life easier for herself!

This reminds me of the Sean Connery film "Forrester" (whatever the English title of it was. Life's not like that, is it?

the increasing use of gramatical abnormalities on the internet has probably got a lot to do with the increasingly busy and stressful lives that we all are a part of. I doubt that many people reading this entery will have read EVERY entry before it (I know I certainly didn't) ant the increased use of abbreviations is to save time.




ZP
(CU L8R)

Well, I've read it all. The problem is that people try and write too much.

So often you get a fax or a letter or an e-mail at work and, if you take the time to read it twice or even three times, you are still discovering new bits of information in it. And I know this doesn't only happen to me because so often I have had people on to me about missing information which was in there all along, they just had to look.

We should concentrate more on

- writing only what the reader wants/needs to know, and no more - questions can be answered later, once the main facts have been digested, if necessary.
- putting the relevant information at the beginning, or in an orderly list (like this one hopes to be)
- formatting the page so that all information is visible at a glance, while still remaining uncluttered
- formulating the information so that it can be understood on first reading and cannot be misunderstood
- although I said above you shouldn't have too much information in your writing (this applies to letters, faxes., etc., still) you should repeat the main piece of data again at the end - or at least refer to it, so that it definitely can't be missed.

Some longer postings in these threads are tedious to read because they are not divided up into enough paragraphs. The average human mind can cope best with little chunks. The content is often very relevant and the writer has a lot to say, but it all comes out in a jumble. Most probably I can also be accused of this somewhere along the line.

At which point I apologise to Manolan for asking for "a Coke without the Bacardi" This is a shining example of the first point I made in the list above. The fact that I had been drinking Coke with Bacardi the first couple of rounds was entirely irrelevant for that order! This is typical of our egocentrical thinking - I arrived at the conclusion "This time I'll have a Coke without the Bacardi" because it was relevant to me that I had been drinking them hitherto. The only information necessary for the person taking the orders was what I want and not what I didn*t want.

Get the point?

Never mind Manolan, you can buy me the Bacardi next time

As someone has already said: "language is about communication". Is it not then sufficient to spell words in such a way that their meaning (the important part) is conveyed? You can spell a great number of words wrongly in any sentence, and still have the sense carried across perfectly.

As for the its/it's argument, George Bernard Shaw was very much against the use of its for the possessive, when all other possessives have apostrophes: John's hair, so why not it's hair? He was certainly for consistency, though.

Someone also stated that language is continually evolving, which is certainly true. Doesn't this mean that different spellings, however wrong they may seem at the time, and however many 'purists' they annoy, will prevail. I notice that no-one's using the 'thou hast' construction for a number of years - how careless!

I hope everyone's read Steven Pinker's book 'The Language Instinct'...

I hope the statement that language is constantly evolving won't be taken as an excuse for any old spelling, sentence construction and punctuation. It _is_ evolving and we should support that, but we should also encourage both clarity of meaning (because communication is important) and beauty of expression (because language is about more than communication).

U kan spel a grate numbr ov wurds ronglee in n-e cent-ence and stil hav the cents carryed a x purrfectly.

All this is true, but that isn't evolution, that's murder. It takes longer to interpret and there's no beauty there. In general, I'm in favour of maintaining the rules where they enhance communication ("its" vs "it's" is important because of meaning), but if that's _all_ you care about then you head towards Newspeak. Why have so many ways of expressing the same idea? What's the point?

The point is beauty, rhetoric, literature. And when you start to consider those, you will see that split infinitives are often offensive, so are prepositions at the end of a sentence and conjunctions at the beginning. But sometimes (that's two sentences starting with prepositions) it can enhance the readability, general flow and beauty to break the rules. Sometimes following the rules gives a ponderous construction and the flow is lost. Sometimes the shock value of breaking the rules is worth all the threat to the language. It's all about balance.

What about the oddities of spelling, though? What about 'carryed' in the sentence (cent-ence?) above? Doesn't it make you want to say 'carr-y-ed' as three syllables? That's what it does to me. That's why it matters that you spell it 'carried'. I know this explanation won't hold for every potential mis-spelling, but that still doesn't make them right! Don't forget convention.

BTW, I thought 'thou'/'you' was an accident, anyway - a mis-transcription.

The more observant among you will have noticed that I started sentences with conjuctions, not prepositions!

Oh, and I can't spell conjunction!

"I hope you will become an English teacher - better still, someone who teaches English teachers."
As much as I probably would be a person who might do okay with that, I don't know if I could handle dealing with the "guidelines" and loads of bull that schools and school districts set up for teachers to follow. They railroad teachers who don't follow the rules to the letter into quitting, or into giving in, or being fired, it seems. I've known of a few teachers at my school that were popular with the students, and as far as I could tell, the students were learning in their classes too, and the next school year, they were gone, most likely because of their unique meathods to reach the students. I could not handle being forced into teaching conformity, and encouraging students to be brainless crabon copies of each other, and that's what I've gotten the impression of what the public "de-education" system here in the states does.

"The idea that words can have nuances, and that syntax and choice of words can bend and colour the meaning of a sentence is alien to most scientific people, which explains why only they could come up with the concept of translating by computer."
I agree with that! Every on-line "translator" I've ever tried to use couldn't get half of anything correct, and this wasn't even with anything complex, or having much in the way of a conotation... the computers can't even tell the difference between words that happen to be spelled the same, but have different meanings depending on how you use them!

"I also wanted to say that, although you think you did better than the teacher had asked in that test, sometimes it is better to go back one stage and go through the steps more obviously."
It was a story, and I was told to write a heroic journey. That meant I had to get "The Call", "Cross the Threashold", "Fight the monster", and "Come to terms with the challenge" or some bull like that. It wasn't an exercise on how to write a story, it was a busy work assignment, because we'd been reading Gilgamesh. As I'd said, if I could remember all the steps (the last two I listed off up there I just guessed at what would follow the thread of illogic they'd been feeding us!) I probably could go back, and find all the steps, and mark them out with a highlighter, so it wasn't that I didn't follow the format, and that I needed to learn anything from it, it was that I didn't think of it as a mad libs thing where I put my character's name in, put in the name of the villian, throw in a couple of cheep sounding fight scenes, and I would have probably gotten 100% on the assignement. (I did get an A, it was just the comment that irked me.)

"I doubt that many people reading this entery will have read EVERY entry before it"
I don't know who hasn't read all the entries before the current one before posting... but I know that *I* always read all the posts before in a thread before I toss in my two cents... I don't like to rehash what's already been discussed, deemed covered, then tossed out like an old hat, unless I know what about it was discussed, and I can bring up an aspect not talked about already, and I feel needs to be brought up. I don't mean to put you down or anything, but I think that jumping into a convsation on here without reading everything before is a little annoying, and causes a bit more trouble than it's worth at times, since people jump in half way and don't realize what's been already brought up often dig up stuff that's old news and everyone else has had more than their fill of. If I don't have time to read all the previous postings before I start to contribute, I usually won't post at all.

Well, anyhow... I'm done for now... I'll be back (That's a promise and a threat! )

Saturn Girl

Of thee/you - it's not a mistranscription. Characters of low rank or familirs are referred to as "thee" - "you" is reserved for noble or at least higher rank. I think Iago in "Othello" switches between the two when talking to Othello (his social superior) and Roderigo (some thick rich bloke he's stringing along).

Of thee/you - it's not a mistranscription. Characters of low rank or familiars are referred to as "thee" - "you" is reserved for noble or at least higher rank. I think Iago in "Othello" switches between the two when talking to Othello (his social superior) and Roderigo (some thick rich bloke he's stringing along).

Double post because I realised I'd spelt "familiars" wrong. We can't have that, now, can we?

Saturn Girl: You make two points which I agree with completely:

- Americans need to learn a second language. If it does nothing else, it enhances our understanding of our own language. I've forgotten almost all of the French I learned in high school, but the bits of English that it taught me are still with me.

- You cannot write well when given too many rules. My junior year, my English teacher loved all of my essays for the first few weeks, and read them aloud in front of the class. Then came al of the rules. I can't remember them all, but I do remember the most ponderous of them, which was that every paragraph had to have a transitional phrase at the beginning and end. Working within those rules, my essays were crap, and I never earned better than a B on another paper.

Near the end of the year I had one opportunity to be free of those rules, when the representative from the University of California system came to administer a practice version of their "Subject A" essay exam, which they use for enrollment and placement, graded on a scale of 1-5. When the results came back, a counselor came with them, for the express purpose of meeting me. It seems that they'd never given a 5 to a high school junior before. My teacher wanted me to rewrite it and submit it to the district writing contest, but I refused. I didn't want him to get teacher credit for my paper, since I felt like he'd been holding me back all year.

Of course, you have to choose which rules to break, and which to follow. Good spelling will not harm your writing. Good grammar is not too onerous. But even the rules of grammar can be bent... just don't overdo it.

Colonel Sellers, frequent conjunctive starter and preposition dangler.

Beginning with a preposition is fine as far as I'm concerned, so long as it's meant to be like that. I bend grammar all the time in my fiction writing, but I wouldn't dream of it in an essay. Look at Kurt Vonnegut - master of the one-line paragraph and beginning sentences with prepositions, but he's still a genius.

Emily, in Hamlet he switches between "thee" and "you" in the scene with Ophelia where Polonius and Claudius are spying upon them. "Thee" is used when refering to Ophelia as it is a singular and "You" is for all women due to its plural nature, (one of them is formal and the other informal, I forget which but I think it is "Thee" for formal).