It's "the worsT", not "the worse"

It's an offensive word to many people because it is sonically close to the very worst kind of racist slur.

What kind of person continues to use a word that offends many people deeply because they "know better"? I'll tell you what sort of person. A cunt.

I agree in the sense that I have a theory that English people (not the Celtic nations) are the only ones in the world who might be uncertain as to how placenames and other words are pronounced, because there aren’t strict, universal rules as there are in other languages. Cholmondeley (Chumley), Wymondham (Windam), Leicester etc.

But that’s what I enjoy about it - it’s a record of our history and all the contributions by invaders.

I haven’t got a utilitarian attitude to language - I admit to a romantic one. I’d hate to have rationalised spelling as in the US.

Nounification is a common linguistic feature. You are just behind the curve. An invite is a modern term for an invitation.

Pure misdirected snobbery on your part.

Perfectly normal pronunciation of the word across huge swathes of the UK population.

Having lived on a farm where there were geese, I can tell you that they are not to be trusted and will be loose wherever they see an opportunity.

And of course one can also loose an arrow and then, having missed, lose it. Field archery is a bugger for that sort of thing.

I’m against the idea of ditching basic skills to put our faith in technology to this degree.

OK, it’s fine if you know how to use language to start with, but it’s analogous to the idea that it’s OK to use a calculator in maths as long as you understand the principles behind the operations. It’s no substitute for understanding how maths works.

I could give lots of egs about this kind of thing…but I’ll try to restrain myself. Many younger people find analogue clocks difficult - and I suppose they are - but with the analogue clock face you get a graphic illustration of the passage of time as well as a way of understanding how hors, minutes and seconds relate to each other. Digital clocks are great for many purposes but the information is displayed in a much more abstract way. I think analogue clocks are best if you’re in an exam and need to see how much time you have left at a glance.

And also 'not caring' feels like an expression, and driver, of the current nihilistic political climate, and the concurrent individualist 'my truth' narrative in culture. So I feel much more uptight about things like this, phones with volume up, pyjamas to Tesco etc than I might otherwise do.

Well, no wonder everything has to aimed at a reading age of about nine now, if straightforward, uncontentious/ inoffensive words must be nixed just in case someone, somewhere might misconstrue them.

It’s ‘If worse comes to the worst’!

It's a moose no' a goose

"There's a moose loose aboot this hoose"

If they weren't drunk when they wrote that, it was possession. 😂

Oh I saw a couple of those too, "for all intense and purposes". Thought it was a genuine auto correct typo (missing the t would put the e on the end of intens) until I saw it again.

Worsted and bested are synonyms. They both mean to get the better of an opponent. Past tense of their verbs.

Worsted, noun, also is a yarn/fabric derived from Worstead.

My mum used to correct us constantly on this when we were teenagers.

Another favourite of hers was " get off" not get off of".

Always makes me think of my A level English: “And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'”
😂

I agree absolutely. Any well written (and I don’t mean ‘literary’) book will do. The trouble is, IMO, a lot of reading for too many is confined to social media dross. SM is all very well, as long as they read something else, too.

I would set a minimum standard say GCSE 4 in English to use the internet

Isn't it just.

It also suggests a lack of reading. The best way to make the rules of grammar stick, is to read.

The context is compeltely wrong, though. 'Now is the winter of discontent' means the end of their discontent - they are looking to better times, not worse ones. Journalists always use it, incorrectly, to signal difficult times ahead.

My current bugbears (alongside most of these) include use instead of used.

As in, "I use to work there too."

And incorrect use of who, eg as in relation to taking about VAWG, "Protect from who?" It's whom.

Or when people use the same preposition twice in a sentence incorrectly. Eg, "To who(m) does this belong to?'

I used to teach EFL to mostly young males in an Arabic speaking country, it took at the most a couple of hours to teach them the difference between it’s and its, and other all too common errors. One of them wasn’t even literate in his own language.

I dare say part of it is down to kids mucking about in lessons and refusing to pay attention. These things (there/they’re/their, who’s whose, your/you’re) really aren’t difficult, though I know some people choose to believe that they’re too hard for ordinary mortals to understand,

Who's and whose. The majority of people go to who's as the default spelling.

You forgot 'of' instead of 'have'. I am also foreign.

It can be. There's a goose loose in the hoose! But yes, I do wish people would take a bit more time to use the correct word for the context they are operating in.

more worse… worsest
bestest
beterer
effected instead of affected
their instead of there
me instead of my
and when should be or
has instead of as

wtf 🤣

I am non-native speaker and these get drilled into your head, so when native speakers mistake them drives me crazy