Grammar, spelling and the decline of the English language

[SoupDragon]

Moving from the Weird Habits thread, I thought I'd share my favourite typo, spotted only last week in Tescos where they were advertising Winnie the Poo play mats. This was both on the big print sign and the smaller shelf label.

My, how I sniggered in a puerile fashion!

Hi Frieda,

Growing the business is a bit like growing flowers only different and less pretty. Benchmarking just means setting benchmarks - techo-jargon for setting a target and measuring performance against it. I have to listen to that kind of rubbish all the time. "Leverage off of" is a particular bugbear. Seems to mean "take advantage of" only it's more clever and more modern and needs a visionary to spot the opportunity to do so. Or something. I blame this fashion for MBAs.

My favourite bit of gobbledegook of all was something I heard one time on PeopleExpress, a long-defunct budget airline in the US. You used to pay on the plane. It was really cheap though, so you could forgive them a lot.

Just before they came round to collect fares, the flight attendant said: "At this time, we shall shortly be commencing our ticketing system process". What?

Anyway, I'd just better go and leverage off of the presence of coffee and begin the kettle ignition process.

love the airline quote, tech.

On a bit of a tangent - a friend was on another budget airline recently and the pilot introduced himself as Dick Toff. Perhaps he was annoyed by all the jargon too.

The jargon word I hate most is "competency" - just sounds wrong.

"Benchmarking" usually also includes an element of comparison, eg a company will look at the best practice in its industry for, say, customer service, use that to set a "benchmark" and then use that benchmark to measure its own performance against. It's supposed to be a tool for improving performance - but yes, it is one of the current "hot" buzzwords.

The buzzword I most hated was when my boss used to tell me we'd have to "touch base". No way was he touching my base or anything else, I can tell you.

oh soupdragon- I didn't realise it meant "in a moment"- I agree- it means "for a moment".

I went for an interview for a job in Japan and one of the interviewers asked me if I'd lived in America as I had used several Americanisms (I rememeber I'd said "overly" ) .

At work I am often alarmed to hear that people intend to 'bottom somthing out' - what?

At work I am often alarmed to hear that people intend to 'bottom somthing out' - what?

Where I remember hearing the "will be stopping momentarily" phrase was on the transit train inO rlando airport. Just as it approaches the end of the journey, you're notified that "this transit will be stopping momentarily". A warning to hold on as it will be stopping shortly, I think.

Herb v erb is DHs favourite American gripe . As I said though, Americans speak American so they're perfectly entitled to their own lauguage quirks. English phrasing probably annoys Americans just as much.

But what I find so annoying about these buzzwords is that I'm suddenly distracted with quite inappropriate mental images when they crop up and totally unable to keep track of what the conversation is really about. Does anyone remember Reggie Perrin and that large grey warthog that used to crop up every time his MIL was mentioned? It's EXACTLY like that for me ? does anyone else have this problem? For "benchmark", for example, I see a long, shiny wooden bench, like the type we used to have in the assembly hall at school, covered in scratchy marks. For "touching base" I see ? well, I won't go into that...
By the time I come back to the conversation, it's generally moved on to who knows where.

Excuse me butting in and going off at a tangent ... a couple of people have mentioned studying liguistics at university. I am starting an access course in Sept at my local uni (Derby)and am trying to decide what to study for a degree. Linguistics is something I'm considering but I don't think they do it at Derby. Any ideas how I can find out which unis do offer it as a subject? TIA.

Please do not scrutinize this post too closely for spelling, grammar, etc!!! (Yes! I know that's too many exclamation marks!)

PS: I do think that a good standard of English is important in formal written communication but I really love regional idioms used in speech. One of my favourite phrases is one of my dad's. He says "See you on the ice" instead of "See you around". Don't ask me why ...

re "erb" - I was once told that in Elizabethan times it was pronounced that way here and was taken over to the US by the Pilgrim Fathers - we started pronouncing the h some time afterwards and they didn't. (Formal English not so long ago used to have an hotel, didn't it? Maybe that was the same thing.)

Momentarily makes me laugh - "the train will be stopping momentarily" - so you had better be bloody quick getting off! Americans use presently differently too - to mean "at the present moment" - the 2 words have almost exchanged meanings.

Has anybody come across "A4" as a verb? Meaning to write down on a piece of paper - "A4 that for me"? Somebody told me they had heard it and I can't tell if I'm being wound up!

Frieda, I love your blueskying vision....

Aaarrrggggghhhhhhh! I've just read the word 'upskill'!!!!!

XAusted, have you tried googling "linguistics degrees"?

My daughter is studying Linguistics at Leeds at the moment - it was the best course for her because there is no literature or foreign language element. (Most of them include one or the other.) Her other 5 possibles were Durham, Newcastle, Sheffield, Lancaster and Essex, and I seem to remember that Keele and Warwick were considered too. HTH!

Thanks, Joe1!

Ooops - wrong thread. How did that happen???

yes janh I agree that the 'verbification' of nouns is intensely irritating; I recently saw a tv advert for McCain chips which said the chips are 'great ovened, great fried 'so clearly it is now possible to 'oven 'something. I actually tried to find a McCain website so I could register my alarm but couldnt find one...how sad is that ??? as an English teacher I do feel very strongly about correct spelling and the general decline in grammatical accuracy. Then again as my husband points out Shakespeare turned nouns into verbs frequently and broke many other so called rules of grammar ! the worst culprits are people who actually say 'pacific' instead of 'specific', and I have heard more than one person do this !!!!

oops, didn't mean to omit that apostrophe !!!!!

McCain's Website

Sorry, but we engineers can't do without our technical jargon! The English language is infinitely enriched by sentences such as:

"C is the result of oring A and B"
"I'll just grep around and find the file you need"
"Are you going to gee pee ell that software?"

So things haven't changed much in the last 11 years JanH. I did my linguistics degree at Durham but also applied to Newcastle, Lancaster, York and Bangor. Only 5 then because it was the old UCCA and PCAS system.

Would Sheffield be too far for you XAusted? Also does Nottingham do anything that might be suitable?

Nottingham does, Bozza! (Quite a few different ones too.)

XAusted, try this page :

search.ucas.co.uk/cgi-bin/hsrun.hse/search/cs2002/StateId/S7ob7SipUVOj-spGsHWFBCcKV5GDC-4EEj/HAHTpage/cs2002.Hsindex20.run?a=7

It has the country divided up by region for Linguistics courses.

My last Head Teacher used to use 'touch base' ALL the time. I could tell he was going to say it by the glint in his eye as he crossed the staffroom towards me. It used to make me grind my teeth ... grrrrrr

I hate to say it but I think touch base is an Americanism. I think it's from baseball where you have to touch the bases as you run around (or something like that as i'm not really an expert on the sport). And I think bottom out comes from cars scraping their belly when they go over bumps too fast.
I'm so glad to hear that "liase" is an American spelling. I thought I'd been spelling the word wrong for 39 years.
ks, in durham "weyeye" means yes, "gannin dune club" means going down to the club, they say "theu" instead of you, they say "hinney" instead of love or pet. Anyway, that's a few bits that steve can think of right now.