Great New Year's Resolution: Speak Proper English

Posted by $ blarman 6 years, 3 months ago to Culture
62 comments | Share | Flag

Language is the key to ideas. When people practice sloppy language, what they are really doing is admitting their own disordered thought patterns. Using proper language, spelling, diction, and vocabulary is the sign of someone who has taken the time to discipline their thoughts. It also reminds me of a scene from "Akeela and the Bee" where the spelling coach instructs young Akeela on the necessity for proper use of grammar.


All Comments

  • Posted by exceller 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    It is just a question soliciting reply from someone you presented an argument/statement to. Hopefully an argument that can be considered worthy of reply.

    You can answer "yes" or "no", agreeing or disagreeing with the presenter. IN case of the latter you are expected to elaborate your own view.

    This is what I think it means.

    My favorite peeve is "at the end of the day" closing a sentence. The presenter is trying to emphasize his view by stating what's going to happen if certain things are done.

    How does he know what will happen by day's end? Of course no one is going to check it so the guy gets away with it, playing the "wise".
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  • Posted by $ 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    No idea for sure, but if we examine it, it is a plea for validation. If it were being used properly, it might invite discussion, but if used ad nauseum it just becomes another filler word: an embolalia (thanks Steven-Wells).
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  • Posted by Steven-Wells 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Probably not. The trigger to make the replacement is a space or punctuation. You'd have to set the term without intervening characters; such as, TooMuchInformation. But if you already knew to type it without spaces, you'd know to type TMI instead.

    In case anyone is going to read this and isn't familiar with how AutoCorrect in MS Office handles capitalization (and would want to know), the replacement takes it cue from the "shortcut" word. If I define: cns to be replaced by constitution, Cns gets replaced with Constitution, and CNS gets replaced with CONSTITUTION.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Whew, I'm relieved! You got me laughing. It isn't just mumbling and improper pronunciation I have trouble with as I have misunderstandings when I'm in the basement and my wife, who I love dearly, is talking to me from up on the 2nd floor of our house, or when she's 30 feet ahead of me in a crowded mall and I'm trying to keep up. Or when I have to tap her on the shoulder in the grocery store and say, "Sorry sweetheart, was that me you were talking to or that pile of potatoes?" LOL!
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Me too. Will it allow you to transform multiple words into acronyms? This can come in handy when texting people under 30. :-)
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  • Posted by $ CBJ 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That may once have been the case, but I looked up "summer" in a few online dictionaries and they both said it can properly be used as a verb.
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  • Posted by freedomforall 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    " even the illiterate can communicate thanks to technology"
    Then they get elected to con-gress and really show their intelligence.
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  • Posted by DrZarkov99 6 years, 3 months ago
    We are in an age where speaking proper English is fast deteriorating. Even supposedly educated people slide lazily into word misuse. It drives me up the wall when I hear someone say "and then they HONED in on the target," and I want to scream at the television, saying "NO, NO, NO, YOU IDIOT! IT'S HOMED IN!" I've also heard TV talking heads use the Ebonics "I AXED him a question," instead of "asked."

    It's only going to get worse, as "smart" phones allow the use of extensive acronym speech (ROTFLMAO) and emojis in texting. You can now dictate your text and have the responses read back to you audibly, so even the illiterate can communicate thanks to technology. Sad.
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  • Posted by $ Suzanne43 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes, it drives me nuts when I hear people say that they "summer" somewhere. Summer is a noun not a verb..
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  • Posted by mccannon01 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Not sure of what you mean here, but I'm an old guy and the usage was around when I was young. It depends on context and the usage I'm familiar with usually expects a response from the listener or expects the listener to think about what was said such as "A equals A, right?"
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 6 years, 3 months ago
    Myself thinks the misuse of “myself” as a pronoun has reached epic proportions!

    Please let Tina and myself know if you plan to butcher English.

    Oh, and phuck your Oxford comma!
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  • Posted by Steven-Wells 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Years ago, I counted a coworker's um's as he gave a technical presentation in front of a large group. I stopped counting at 200 in less than five minutes.
    Unbearable!
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  • Posted by Steven-Wells 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Too many (disguised as humans) doing it already. I'm hopeful that actual bots will create material with better grammar and spelling than millennials and Gen-Z's. Google Translate usually produces plausible English content.
    But we have nothing to fear from Asian bots as a quick stroll at http://www.Engrish.com demonstrates. I just went through the "Menu" items, clicking Previous Week's Engrish until I had stop from the pain of laughing so hard.
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  • Posted by $ 25n56il4 6 years, 3 months ago
    My greatest complaint is people who don't open their mouth to talk. They enunciate rapidly and don't open their mouth and we are supposed to be able to understand them!
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  • Posted by Steven-Wells 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Even worse, Congress-child Occasional-Cortex votes in the House. With all her bartender experience to help her say stupid things, like the "three chambers of government." When I mentioned to my brother that she had said that, he said he'd cut her some slack because many people might say "chambers" instead of "branches." But when I explained that her chambers were the House, the Senate, and the President, he recanted with, "Ohhh Nooo!"
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  • Posted by term2 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Imagine if liberal google or Apple was trying to make me pc with only appropriate words allowed
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  • Posted by Steven-Wells 6 years, 3 months ago in reply to this comment.
    In Word (all settings work throughout all of MS Office): pre-ribbon, on the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect options. In the dialog box that opens, enter the Replace and With fields, and then click Add.
    wn > when
    bc > because
    env > environment
    exp > experience

    Ribbon versions:
    Click the File tab, click Options. In the Word Options dialog box, click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.
    The rest as above.

    If you web-search, you can find macros for storing, exporting, and importing your customized AutoCorrect entries. They go into a Word document table where you can edit them in bulk.

    Tips: Use non-words for the replace term, otherwise you might get unwanted results from ordinary words.
    apx > approximately
    doi > Declaration of Independence
    cmp > computer
    but not com for computer, or you'll end up with bad web addresses in documents, such as www.galtsgulchonline.computer

    I set separate entries for singular and plural pairs so I can display only a single entry in my cheat sheet. I set such entries to a color instead of black to indicate a pair. To me, from a typing perspective, the natural addition to create a plural is to repeat the last letter because I already had a finger on the right key. So:
    mgt > management (in black in my cheat sheet)
    cg > change (in dark red in my cheat sheet to show that I created two entries):
    cg > change
    cgg > changes

    You can also throw in transpositions that Microsoft may not cover, such as:
    nad > and
    or words that are hard to remember which is right:
    consistant > consistent
    seperate > separate

    For words that get underlined, that's a different issue.
    If you live in Conshohocken Pennsylvania, MS Office will not recognize the town name.
    You can edit the custom dictionary (or create multiple custom dictionaries) under Proofing.
    Perform a web-search to find out where your version of Office keeps custom.dic and open it in Notepad. Or create it if it does not already exist. It's just a list of words that will be "known" as correctly spelled.
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