Pedants' safe-house

[oldbutgold]

In view of the strong feeling expressed towards inveterate error-spotters (aka passive-aggressive bullies/pedants/twats etc) what about a thread for all the spelling errors/grammatical mistakes seen stricly outside MN in RL?
Like journalist Keith Waterhouse who was president of the AAA - campaigned throughout his career for the Abolition of the Abhorrent Apostrophe.
Spotted by self recently:

Ladie's hairdressers (in town)
Childrens' Society (on BBC)
10 items or less (everywhere)

how is cheese latin?

anyway, if it is, i apologise, just can't see the link!
those words arenot how they originated, if they are from latin, so they don't count.
they only count if we have the exact same word, as in your Italian references.

peninsular has the plural of peninsulae.

i thought physician was greek?

i only know violins, pizze and umbrellas.

but, again, the first and the latter were brought in with their own plurals - they've never had italian accepted endings.
they're stolen not borrowed

believe me, i'm not trying to be awkward: if you tell me the correct endings i'll try to learn them and use them.

I'd sooner be correct and be thought of as a poncey twat that be wrong!

cheese: Middle English chese, from Old English cse, from Germanic *kasjus, from Latin cseus
so it isn't cheese in latin, so it can't have a latin ending.

city: Middle English cite, from Old French, from Latin cvits, from cvis, citizen; see kei-1 in Indo-European roots

again, is not in latin as "city" so that doesn't count either.

they have to be exactly the same in their original language as they are in ours.

so stadium counts because it is the same.

this is quite interesting regarding latin plurals

Can I ask - what's gramatically wrong with "10 items or less"???? I can't figure it out!

i found this as well in google about plurals

But the point I was making, rather facetiously, was that these were adopted into the language as the original word, and then changed over time, and that is essentially what's happening with stadium.

And do you use pizze?

"they're stolen not borrowed"

So how long does a word have to be used in English before it stops being "borrowed"?

How do you define "stolen"? Is that when a word gets changed?

Surely as long as a word is being used as an "everyday" English term, like "agenda" or "stadium", it should be pluralised according to the rules of English (unless you want to be poncey, of course).

By the way, when a word is borrowed, do you have to give it back?

less refers to a mass noun, so something you'd refer to as a singular - a bit less sugar, say, whereas fewer refers to count nouns - you wouldn't say " a bit fewer sugar" (unless you added grains or crystals at the end and braced yourself for an odd look). It's easier to see where fewer doesn't work, generally.

Do you actually say peninsulae, nickel? And is your ire restricted to Latin borrowings? What about those from Old Norse? Why, in fact, are we not using Old English still? To me, this is the slippy slope of pedantry.

qwerty - it should be 10 items or fewer.

less means a quantity like liquid - where you can take some water out, leaving less water
if you have some apples, if you take an apple away, you have fewer apples (because fewer refers to a number) - if you have less apples, then you've taken a bite out of some of them!

This is a good parody of pedantry

singsinthebath - it was a joke.

i suppose it's borrowed when you don't change the word, but taken when you have changed it.

and Habibu for being facetious! naughty!

yes, i do say peninsulae and encyclopediae, too.

i don't mind language changing when it changes, but i'm not hurrying it along! if i know the correct usage, i'll use it.

But change happens over time, nickel - a word that would have entered Middle English in its native form is now barely recognisable in modern English - e.g. cheese.

Habibu at you rlink.

that was very funny.

but very good and i think they should all be ejected from the meeting!

your link

true, about changing - I just want it to happen as it happens, not to be forced to happen by people who don't understand/can't/won't learn the rules of the standards as they are.

we can't use the excuse that our language doesn't have clear rules - they were introduced and accepted quite a long while ago.
in the days when it was impossible to communicate by written means, i accept that there would have been more leeway (sp?) and less grounding for "the correct form", but now everyone can access all the relevant information.

that's been the case since free education was introduced.

It is good, isn't it? Linked to from The Language Log, which I like. I love linguistics, and believe it or not I love English - that's why I spent 8/9 years studying it, and another 5 working in the field at postdoc. I just find extreme pedantry misinformed - issues over style I have no problem with, and accept that a formal register is very useful, but to equate that with fixed linguistic rules in just Wrong!

Great quote here:

"Martin Estinel of the Queen?s English Society, for example, wants to protect English from being ?diluted by foreign influences.? (By ?foreign? he means ?American.?) Unless he plans to set up an academy to return to Anglo-Saxon, there is no getting around the plain fact that English, British English included, is a wanton little baggage that bears upon its body traces of every other language it has ever brushed against. There are children who know this."

But unreferenced! here, sorry

s'pose.

it just makes it easier to be understood.

there are a few examples, which i can't be bothered to think about now, where one half of the country might say one thing, but the other half say another thing, and neither knows what the other party is talking about.

that "discreet/discrete" row could be one - that's just simple misspelling, but you see it written down somewhere it could actually make a difference, and you've got a mess.

s'pose.

it just makes it easier to be understood.

there are a few examples, which i can't be bothered to think about now, where one half of the country might say one thing, but the other half say another thing, and neither knows what the other party is talking about.

that "discreet/discrete" row could be one - that's just simple misspelling, but you see it written down somewhere it could actually make a difference, and you've got a mess.

weird, i've always wondered how to double post!

"we can't use the excuse that our language doesn't have clear rules - they were introduced and accepted quite a long while ago.
in the days when it was impossible to communicate by written means, i accept that there would have been more leeway (sp?) and less grounding for "the correct form", but now everyone can access all the relevant information."

You're going to have to back that up! I spent a long time studying historical linguistics, and nowhere did I find a point in which a set of clear rules were introduced and accepted.

bimonthly drives me mad - it correctly means twice a month and every two months.

whose stupid idea was that? it doesn't even help if you have a context, as if you say "the committee meets bimonthly" then you still don't know how often they meet!

Yes, discrete/discreet leads to communicative ambiguity, and I do mourn the passing of disinterested in its original form, but then there were many useful words in English in the past which we no longer use.

And English has been written for a very long time, and has changed nonetheless. Do you really think it's possible to simply stop sematic change, just by making people learn a set of rules that someone somewhere has decided are " correct"?