Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

He’s not his

194 replies

LuckyAmy1986 · 03/01/2020 17:38

Anyone else noticed a rise in this?
Eg “love Bradley Cooper his so beautiful”. I hate it. AIBU?

OP posts:
Thread gallery
6
Motoko · 05/01/2020 23:58

All of the above, plus "then" instead of "than". "I'm bigger then her". It's been doing the rounds for a few years now, and I was shocked to see it on the BBC News site. I thought they would have higher standards.

Did everyone put their ballballs away this weekend?

APJ1 · 06/01/2020 00:02

Many times I've seen people write that they 'done a degree'. It makes them sound a little less than university-educated!

JKScot4 · 06/01/2020 00:04

Another; ‘She's going to borrow me her car’
aaaarrgghhhh!!!!!!

nonamehere · 06/01/2020 00:22

"She was sat on her phone"

x2boys · 06/01/2020 07:07

I.did see one that made me smile a facebook.friend posted a picture of her son in his new school uniform and.someone commented that he looked very swarve Grin

Zaphodsotherhead · 06/01/2020 16:01

Pretty much any French word used in English, actually. The various spellings of 'naive' that I've seen just on here indicate that most people have never seen the word correctly written down. 'Swarve' and 'click' are the same thing.

READ MORE, people!

ProfessorSlocombe · 06/01/2020 16:35

Another; ‘She's going to borrow me her car’

Our mortgage broker spent half an hour working out how much she could "borrow us" Grin. It's definitely more prevalant in the Midlands.

Zaphodsotherhead

Pretty much any French word used in English, actually. The various spellings of 'naive' that I've seen just on here indicate that most people have never seen the word correctly written down.

There's a philosophical debate to be had about the nature of loanwords. And whatever the outcome of that debate (which isn't going to happen here Grin) I'd humbly submit that English is an exception anyway.

The moment a word becomes extant in English, it's ours, and we can jolly well do with it what we like Grin.

So naïve just becomes the English word "naive", and that's that. A correctly spelled English word; not an incorrectly spelled French word. Especially as "officially" English has no accents or diacritics - they certainly don't feature in GCSE and A levels.

READ MORE, people!

A good exhortation, but you really need to read the right stuff Grin. No amount of "Hello !" is going to sharpen peoples linguistic chops.

JamieVardysHavingAParty · 06/01/2020 18:39

I also think naive is acceptable. It's an English word which derives from the French naïve. You could put that in the OED. Expecting people to learn to do an accented letter i on their laptop keyboard just for the sake of saying naïve is unreasonable.

Walla for voila, though? Hard pass on that.

CatteStreet · 06/01/2020 18:42

I think Zaphod means spellings such as 'niave' and 'niaive'.

Zaphodsotherhead · 06/01/2020 19:09

Exactly, Catte. Only today I saw it spelled nieve on here.

WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll · 06/01/2020 19:32

Dave Gorman did a bit on a couple of his shows about it and apparently Twitter is rife with people not knowing the original phrase.

Ah, yes! He reprised his Catphrase feature on his new programme (ably assisted by the lovely Mr Roast Potatoes, of course). The one that left me open-mouthed was ‘on except a bowl’ as in ‘I will not tolerate this, it is completely on except a bowl’. I had a little look for this ‘phrase’ online and there are indeed some people who have written it, apparently in all seriousness. [shocked]

When you come back with more, hopefully, your comma button will be fixed.

Technically, that’s bad grammar too. Everybody (including me, I must admit) uses ‘hopefully’ in that way, but, as an adverb, it corresponds with the verb and therefore the subject of the verb. Strictly speaking, you’re saying that the comma button will be full of hope whilst it is being fixed. Smile

Nope, I absolutely don't. The letter H is snobbishly traditionally pronounced Aitch and thus begins with a vowel. Therefore it is an H.

Fun fact: there are two 5-letter words in the English language from which one can remove four of the letters and the word will still be pronounced in the same way. Both of them have been mentioned on this thread already!

Yes – I too always hear Manuel in my head whenever somebody writes ‘que’ Grin

I also think naive is acceptable. It's an English word which derives from the French naïve. You could put that in the OED. Expecting people to learn to do an accented letter i on their laptop keyboard just for the sake of saying naïve is unreasonable.

Aside from the accent issue, does anybody else get irrationally irritated when people refer to a male person as being naïve? A lot of people also similarly confuse blond and blonde.

WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll · 06/01/2020 19:33

Shock/Shocked fail Grin

Itwasntme101 · 06/01/2020 19:33

Foot stall annoys me instead of footstool

JamieVardysHavingAParty · 06/01/2020 19:39

I'm not bother by naif/naive, but blond/blonde absolutely does bother me.

Even worse than that is people referring to a bereaved male spouse as a widow. The word is widower! Widower, widower, widower!

JamieVardysHavingAParty · 06/01/2020 19:40

*I'm not botherED. FFS, Jamie, learn to type!

Justgorgeous · 06/01/2020 20:30

The one that gets me is “I love them shoes” It’s “Those shoes” !!

Nanny0gg · 07/01/2020 00:31

Even worse than that is people referring to a bereaved male spouse as a widow. The word is widower! Widower, widower, widower!

I think, in same-sex relationships, that is done deliberately.

JamieVardysHavingAParty · 07/01/2020 00:34

In the cases I've seen, it wasn't a same-sex relationship. If it had been a same-sex marriage, I'd have thought it was interesting.

Actually, I'm interested now to hear that there may be a preference for widow amongst bereaved gay and bisexual men. That is fascinating linguistic change.

40somethingJBJ · 07/01/2020 01:11

My pet hates are:

Been instead of being (and vice versa).
The use could of, should of, would of etc.
A common one I’ve noticed (homes under the hammer I’m looking at you!) is “needs modernised”. No, it needs to be modernised, or needs modernising.
A Facebook one recently, “are angels are been sooo gud 2day!” That made me twitchy!

charlestonchaplin · 07/01/2020 04:57

I’m really bad at getting around to responding to comments on threads I’ve posted on, so I’m glad this thread has popped up again.

Rosebud21 You seem to have gone looking for evidence that I’m wrong, rather than objectively considering whether I am right or not. Let’s take this excerpt you posted and apply it to my A&E example:

The essential difference between these two words is that bring implies movement towards someone or something: Bring your instrument with you when you come over. Whereas take implies movement away from someone or something: Take your belongings with you when you're leaving. www.lexico.com/grammar/bring-or-take

You can imagine a mother speaking by phone to someone in the A&E department, a nurse perhaps. The nurse says to her after listening to the symptoms, ‘Bring your daughter to A&E’. This is analogous to, ‘Bring your instrument with you when you come over’.

But what would the mother say to her husband to explain where she’s going? She’d say, ‘I’m taking Sarah to A&E’. Apparently the Irish way is to say ‘I’m bringing Sarah to A&E’. That is wrong, and what you posted doesn’t say it is right. The fact is, you don’t really understand the meaning of what you posted.

When people talk about Irish usage of bring and take, I assume they mean colloquial usage rather than that being considered standard Irish English. I do expect people to be able to adjust their language depending on the audience, to some extent at least. This is a British website with an international audience. It is appropriate that those who were taught standard English at school use that here.

(I remember being taught that sentences should never start with the word ‘but’, but it seems really appropriate here, plus googling tells me it isn’t a hard and fast rule. Also, the location of punctuation around quote marks always confuses me, so if I’ve got that wrong I’m happy to be enlightened. If I’ve made any other mistakes please tell me. I’d rather look a fool on the internet where no one knows who I am than in real life.)

SaphfireRose · 07/01/2020 05:21

Yep OP, I have noticed it over the last few years and it drives me bananas. Notice how you never see it the other way around, like "he's car"? It is only 'his' for he's. I don't understand, is it a typo, or do people really think that 'his' means 'he's'?

SaphfireRose · 07/01/2020 05:49

Also, "I was sat" or "I am sat". I see this at least once a day on Mumsnet. It sounds like broken English and does not make any sense, written or verbally. I often wonder how bad the English skills of the writer are when I see that. "I am sat here crying" Sat, is past tense. So you are saying you were sat crying, and you no longer are. Which makes the 'am' redundant.

It should be "I am sitting here crying" (present tense). Or "I sat crying" (past tense). Seriously, 'I am sat' and 'I was sat' doesn't even sound right in your head or verbally, it just sounds and looks like someone who is learning English as a second language. I really, really wish posters on this site would please STOP using 'I was sat'/'I am sat'. It is unintelligent and embarrassing.

When did 'sitting' and 'seating'/'seated' cease to exist in English?

SaphfireRose · 07/01/2020 05:55

PS to the OP, thanks for this thread. It gives us the opportunity to say this, when if we said it in a usual thread we would be attacked for being a 'grammar nazi'. When as this thread shows, if people aren't corrected, they continue to make the same mistake. As the poster with the neighbour who says 'Trickle Treating', that happens purely because no one has ever thought to correct her. So it's a catch 22 because if you correct them you are accused of derailing the thread, being a spelling/grammar nazi, being smug, etc. Yet, if you are never corrected, how will you learn? People are too afraid to correct others because of the reactions hence the poster will never know they are wrong. This thread at least allows us to do that.

CatteStreet · 07/01/2020 05:57

'I do expect people to be able to adjust their language depending on the audience, to some extent at least. This is a British website with an international audience. It is appropriate that those who were taught standard English at school use that here.'

Shock Don't know where to start with that one.

The usage of 'bring'/'take' you dislike so much (also found in international English, btw, as a transference from speakers' native languages) doesn't render the content incomprehensible. Your long explanations of why they are 'wrong' just smack a little of snobbery and linguistic colonialism, I'm afraid.

I made a point about the semantic nuance of 'I was sat' above. As well as that, it's also a regionalism/colloquialism I can't get worked up about, tbh.

BillHadersNewWife · 07/01/2020 06:20

I used to be very unsympathetic to people who posted on social media with lots of spelling mistakes. Until I had a child with dyslexia that is.

Some people just can't help it. I'm the same with maths...who am I to judge?