you Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

I have been losing my grammar grouch badge. Frankly, I never really embraced the title. As early as 1972, when the first issue of Ms. magazine came out- I purchased it right away – I realized the efficacy of using the word Ms. as opposed to Miss or Mrs., in comparison with the term Mr.

I’ve embraced variations on you. Newish takes on they/them make a lot of sense to me.

Part of my learning on the topic comes from being around my wife, who taught English as a New Language, formerly known as English as a Second Language. Among other things, I realized that English is difficult and irrational; often, it doesn’t make much sense.

Actually, I knew that well before that, certainly by the time I first saw Dr. Seuss’s book The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough.

I have been listening to a lot of YouTube videos by RobWords. He takes on some of the weird variations in the language, looking at the historical as well as the current usage. He explains, for instance, in The Great Vowel Shift, why certain words that look like they should rhyme do not. (When I was doing Wordle recently and was trying to find words ending in ROWN, I immediately picked up brown, crown, drown, and frown but missed grown because it doesn’t rhyme.) Certainly, somebody who isn’t a native speaker would have real difficulty with that.

Punctuation

Still, I remember back in 2005 when a bunch of bloggers were new to me. One of them, a very smart guy, had a terrible time comparing the word its and the word it’s. Without him asking, I made it my mission to gently, firmly, and repetitively explain the difference. BTW, it did not work. I now look back at that with a certain degree of, “Boy, was I arrogant,” along with “Why are you bothering to do this?”

More recently, some folks online were lamenting that young people don’t end their sentences with a period/full stop. It wasn’t this 2021 article, but the sentiment was the same. The subtitle: To younger people, putting a period at the end of a casually written thought could mean that you’re raring for a fight.

“To younger generations, using proper punctuation in a casual context like texting can give an impression of formality that borders on rudeness, as if the texter is not comfortable enough with the texting partner to relax. The message-ending period establishes a certain distance… Simply put, the inclusion of a formality in casual communication is unnerving.

“Think of a mother using her son’s full name when issuing a stern ultimatum.”

I didn’t say this, but I should have included that in this space of acronyms (LMAO, TY): We older folks are non-native speakers. We should at least try to speak their language, as I practiced my rudimentary French in 2023 when I was in western France.

“Every generation tends to loathe to some extent the way the generation after them speaks.”

Oh, John Green muses over Which is Correct? — or – ? And why not?

Whereforartthou

RobWords asked, Where did punctuation come from?

He makes a very good case that spaces between words are punctuation marks. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who had to read breakeless texts mumbling aloud like a modern six-year-old, spaces and other punctuation made texts more comprehensible. We can thank, in part, the proselytizing by early Christians.

I’m pretty lax about apostrophes. Some believe the apostrophe used to show possession is a shortening of John his horse to John’s horse. This is probably not true.

“In Old English, you just stuck an S on the end of a noun to reference it as belonging to someone with no apostrophe needed.”

If you want to use a word to show the possession of the house owned by the Joneses, I don’t care if they use JONES or JONESES, with or without the apostrophe, But the one thing that does make me crazy is when they use JONE’S; you never break into the word.

Acorns, er, eggcorns

“Have I mentioned anything that you’ve been using wrongly yet? If not, I’m determined to find one by the time we’re through because it’s almost

certain that you’ve used at least one.

“Say you’ve heard someone voicing disapproval about another person’s clothing – or more precisely, lack of it. If you’ve never come across the phrase “scantily clad” before – or the word scantily at all – it’s perfectly logical to then interpret that as “scandally clad”. It’s kind of clever. You’ve even had to invent a word.”

Eggcorns, mondegreens, and even malaprops don’t bother me as they used to.

A line must be drawn.

Still, some words have been ruined for me. It’s not because the meaning of the word has changed. An apology or apologia has been a formal explanation or defense of a belief or system. But it’s more likely defined thee days as “an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret.” The plural apologies is “an expression of regret for not being able to do something.” This is fine.

“Decimate” now means to destroy by well greater than ten percent. I’m okay with that.

Rob has several words that bug his readers the most, and I fully agree with their choices. The current use of unique with a comparative (more unique) grates on me.

But their #1, and mine as well, is literally. Over a decade ago, I purged it from my vocabulary. As I wrote: “While using literally to mean figuratively may be OK (for some), what do I use when I REALLY, REALLY mean literally? How can I make this clear to the reader/listener? Therefore, I must sadly conclude that the word ‘literally’ has been rendered useless to me. If it doesn’t mean one thing, but rather the thing OR its opposite, then it doesn’t mean anything at all.”

I don’t think I considered it until I took French in high school, but I realized at that point that standard English was deficient. While French has tu for the second person singular and vous for second-person plural, English uses the word you for both. I subsequently discovered that most languages followed the French rule, such as German du/ihr and Russian ty/vy.

So some groups have developed their own set of second-person plural pronouns, such as y’all and yous.

Some Australians, just like some Americans and some Brits, have for many years now been happily using valid second person plural pronouns. It helps in clear communication, allows succinctness of expression, and, sadly, has invariably been associated with a lack of education and low socioeconomic status.

But it is not the failure of the speakers, it’s the failure of the language. These words do not reflect ignorance on the part of speakers who use them, but a legitimate linguistic development called leveling by morphological analogy, whereby missing pieces of the grammar are generated by analogy with other parts of grammar. In other words, people instinctively create words when the meaning would otherwise be ambiguous.

Thus English is lacking here, but it was not always so. The King James Bible, e.g. has a perfectly useful pairing, thou for singular, ye for plural. Over the years, however, the terms meshed.

My basic point is that perhaps we ought not to deride those people who have creatively addressed a linguistic need.

Four years ago, the TIME person of the year was YOU. Read all about it.