just remembered the song (parody song?) ''word crimes'' (i think. by weird al yankovic idk) and beloved ELL student friend, whatever do you make of it? would very much like to know your thoughts :3
alright here we go!! welcome to my saturday night talk show.
thoughts, thoughts... first up, a disclaimer. I had not heard the song before, and this is all just what I thought when listening to it for the first time (and I guess a few more times while writing). I am also not an admirable student.
now that that's out of the way: the first thing that came to mind was that the word "crimes" is rather harsh! as if it were a punishable crime... well, sg is known as a fine country. (how much would I have to pay for the improper english in this post?)
If you can't write in the proper way
the "proper" way is context-dependent! Here, however, it likely refers to the standard variety used in some particular region, probably Standard American English or Standard British English.
oh, but here's the catch: those aren't the only varieties around, are they? especially with the number of people around the world that speak English nowadays. What do we speak? can we call it British English? debatable. (but it probably doesn't matter what we call it. anyway, the last part of this is relevant here, I think).
perhaps we should say the a proper way--no no no, "proper" still suggests "correct". here we go full circle: what's correct is context-dependent!
Maybe you flunked that class
flunked? like literally? sounds unfortunate
And maybe now you find
That people mock you online
The really funny ones are those where they go back and forth telling each other off in the comments of a completely unrelated post.
in my opinion? it's the internet. over half the world is here, so language and opinions surrounding language vary. I'd rather find other things to do than give strangers unsolicited (and subjective) advice on language. unless it's a language exchange site (where by all means give feedback but not mock), I think it's... it's... I don't know, these people are trolling.
Gonna familiarize you
so... is gonna acceptable "proper" language because of its high use?
(not entirely relevant but. if I had written familiarize in primary school, that would not have been accepted. but they no longer do that, if I'm not wrong. American English is getting more trendy now, eh?)
You'll learn the definitions of nouns and prepositions
oh I still remember that preposition song!
Now, did I stammer
hm. might not be a problem with literacy
You should know when it's "less" or it's "fewer"
now this reminds me of the thing with the Tesco checkout signs ("ten items or less", which if you go by the books, is ungrammatical) in one of our exam texts
Like I could care less
I've never heard this. (either it's not said here, or it's not said in my circle. both are possible)
You'd better slow down and use the right pronoun
which would be...?
Your participle's danglin'
hm. fair
although I imagine this matters only for formal stuff. in other cases? context fills things in, and the main goal is communication, I think. If that's achieved even with a dangling particle, so be it. (we don't want another chain of funny comments)
If you really wanna, leave out that Oxford comma
I would say that I use those pretty often. why? I don't know. If you've put a comma after everything else, why be quirky and end the pattern? (or maybe I'm just indecisive as to whether I'm actually ending the list or not.)
why would you want to leave it out?
Use your spellchecker
ew. it doesn't do what I want it to. no thank you (at least for writing creative fiction and personal things.)
You should never write words using numbers unless you're seven
is there something I'm not getting? (I would not be surprised if that were true.) I don't think the majority of seven year olds know how to do that.
Well anyway, I think it's really cool when words are written with numbers! what's that... does it fall under rebus? They're creative. It takes some smarts both to come up with them and to understand them. and I do find abbreviations/initialisms/acronyms fascinating in the same way! (unfortunately, I am rather terrible at remembering new ones. Now, I'm going on a little tangent here. a friend asked why I don't exactly text--how do I put it--more like a stereotypical person belonging to Generation Z. First of all, everyone writes differently. second, you want the kind of thing that appears in those lists of "teen slang words" and the like? I can pull it off quite well. however, it's not what I'm used to. I have a theory it's a tumblr thing. and possibly school. I shall not elaborate.)
Well, you should hire some cunning linguist to help you distinguish what is proper English
That won't work. Linguists argue about it too.
Time to learn your homophones is past due
why?
Always say "to whom"
Don't ever say "to who"
This has unfortunately been drilled into me, resulting in a slightly uncomfortable feeling whenever I see "to who". But recall that I believe it's a waste of time to argue with people.
but the following... were not brought to my attention from an early age.
I hope you never use quotation marks for emphasis
then what am I supposed to write in reading comprehension?
I hope you can tell
If you're doing good or doing well
eh?
And I thought that you'd gotten it through your skull
What's figurative and what's literal
now that's taking the fun out of English. people like to play with language! I absolutely love the power of figurative language to keep boredom at bay. (And due to the productive nature of language, we have a growing number of tools at out disposal to do just that.)
I read your e-mail
It's quite apparent
Your grammar's errant
You're incoherent
that's mean! And perfectly grammatical passages can be incoherent as well.
Think you should only
Write in emoji
That's a tall task. And if I remember correctly, Gretchen McCulloch mentioned in her book Because Internet that she had considered giving a presentation in emoji but realised the limitations of emojis. They're not quite a language due to the many possible interpretations. There's no agreed-upon way to read emojis. (And, again if I'm remembering this correctly, she described them as gestures instead. Ah, here we go.)
Never mind I give up
sometimes that's hard too, especially for the rules that have been ingrained in you
@rainonthehillside @litanyofthemartyrs a penny for your thoughts? (optional)
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Punches, I know this is completely out of the blue, but I know you're a lowercase "l" librarian and an uppercase "A" Archivist so I wanted to toss a question your way.
I had a conversation with someone who claimed that the Oxford Dictionary was, essentially, not a good resource for accurately defining current slang. This came up because I Google'd the definition of a term, the result of which this person didn't find accurate. I acquiesced that maybe it wasn't perfect since language can and does move faster than documentation, but that it was still completely fair to cite. This person utterly snubbed such reasoning, saying to cite Urban Dictionary instead.
I know Urban Dictionary just fine, and agree it's a decent resource for quickly emerging and very new slang, but the complete toss out the window of Oxford really threw me for a loop. Any thoughts what resources might be best in this day and age for defining words - classic dictionary or crowd sourced? Also, when I say "cite" I'm not talking about any kind of academic paperwork, I mean in a typical "oh hey what does that word mean again?" kind of way.
Also I promise I'm not some word snob, I've just never heard anyone discard the dictionary so casually and confidently before. Oxford or otherwise.
Totally fine to answer publicly or privately btw
Oh man this is an excellent question and such a fun one to get!
You're correct in identifying me as lowercase 'l' librarian, so please take my response with a book of salt.
However! As an Archivist, I can speak to the topic at hand and say you're correct in that language evolves and changes faster than documentation. There's a concept in archives I always blank on (something doctrine? literary merit?) which basically proposes that certain terms have to come from the outside organically at which point the Library of Congress documents the change with an official subject category. Ground-up instead of top-down.
In many ways this strikes me as a similar situation with slang terms. There's no way the OED can keep up, the way the system works and is built just doesn't account for that. There are rules about how/when a word can be officially added and there are good reasons for that. That said, other resources have popped up, namely Urban Dictionary and others. But also Urban Dictionary isn't always the most reliable having multiple definitions that sometimes counter each other and don't necessarily have reliable sources given its crowdsourced nature.
Often I've found Merriam-Webster online to have some slang terms. It seems like a good middle ground between the the OED and UD. Tossing out the OED entirely seems silly to me, especially since language can be very cyclical and often the etymology of a word can come into contemporary play and the OED is very good at word history. ('Got the morbs' for example, becoming popular again ironically (not ironically?) in the post-everything era.)
As with most things, having multiple sources is usually a good idea anyway so tell your friend to get off their high-brow (low-brow?) horse and that the OED is still perfectly fine to reference, even for slang.
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Old Dream SMP stream conversations that make me laugh.
Wilbur: why don't you like swearing?
BBH: it's not that I don't appreciate swearing, it's that I think there's a time and a place.
Wilbur: when is that time and place?
BBH: Never!
Wilbur: Well, then you might as well say there's not a time and a place.
BBH: Exactly! See, you get it!
Wilbur 0.0: He's got me there. He's an expert debator.
Tommy: you got owned!
This happened slightly pre-election if anyone's wondering.
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When Tangle and Jewel are chilling together, they would suddenly hear A LOT of chaotic girl voices that get louder and louder, until hundreds of Padoru's come into view, charging towards and past their direction while singing the Padoru song. When they're gone, Tangle would find a santa hat on top of her head.
" Whats that noise? "
" i don't know..."
" HOLY JALAPENO ON A STICK! "
" TANGLE?!?!?! "
LOTS OF SCREAMING AS THE TWO ARE CONSUMED BY A CLOUD OF DUST!
"... What the HELL just happened! "
" La...la...la-nguage...."
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