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Showing posts with label LANGUAGE and CULTURE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LANGUAGE and CULTURE. Show all posts

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SINGULAR 'THEY' (From Oxford English Dictionary Blog)

👉 An excerpt from "A brief history of singular they", by Dennis Baron

Singular ‘they’ has become the pronoun of choice to replace ‘he and she’ in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like ‘Everyone loves his mother’.
Since forms may exist in speech long before they’re written down, it’s likely that singular 'they' was common even before the late fourteenth century. That makes an old form even older.

In the eighteenth century, grammarians began warning that singular 'they' was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular 'you' was a plural pronoun that had become singular as well. You functioned as a polite singular for centuries, but in the seventeenth century singular 'you' replaced 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy', except for some dialect use. That change met with some resistance. […]

Singular 'you' has become normal and unremarkable. […] And singular 'they' is well on its way to being normal and unremarkable as well. Toward the end of the twentieth century, language authorities began to approve the form. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) not only accepts singular they, they also use the form in their definitions. And the New Oxford American Dictionary (Third Edition, 2010), calls singular 'they' ‘generally accepted’ with indefinites, and ‘now common but less widely accepted’ with definite nouns, especially in formal contexts.

Not everyone is down with singular 'they'. The well-respected Chicago Manual of Style still rejects singular 'they' for formal writing, and just the other day a teacher told me that he still corrects students who use ‘everyone … their’ in their papers, though he probably uses singular 'they' when his students aren’t looking. […]


👉 Dennis Baron – Professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read Dennis’s blog, The Web of Language, and follow him on Twitter as @DrGrammar.

ARE AMERICANISMS KILLING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE? by Hephzibah Anderson (From BBC Culture)

A book released in 2017 claims that Americanisms will have completely absorbed the English language by 2120 - Hephzibah Anderson takes a look.
From: BBC Capital
So, it turns out I can no longer speak English. This was the alarming realisation foisted upon me by Matthew Engel’s witty, cantankerous yet nonetheless persuasive polemic That’s the Way it Crumbles: The American Conquest of EnglishBecause by English, I mean British English.

Despite having been born, raised and educated on British shores, it seems my mother tongue has been irreparably corrupted by the linguistic equivalent of the grey squirrel. And I’m not alone. Whether you’re a lover or a loather of phrases like “Can I get a decaf soy latte to go?”, chances are your vocabulary has been similarly colonised.

Speaking on the wireless in 1935, Alistair Cooke declared that “Every Englishman listening to me now unconsciously uses 30 or 40 Americanisms a day”. In 2017, that number is likely closer to three or four hundred, Engel hazards – more for a teenager, “if they use that many words in a day”.

But how did this happen and why should we care? After all, as a nation we’ve been both invaded and invader, and our language is all the richer for it. Words like bungalow, bazaar, even Blighty, have their roots elsewhere. Heck, go far enough back and isn’t it pretty much all just distorted Latin, French or German?

The first American words to make it across the pond were largely utilitarian – signifiers for flora and fauna that didn’t exist back in Merrie England. Moose, maize and tobacco were among them. But there were others, too, that in retrospect might seem laden with significance – words like plentifulness, monstrosity and conflagration.

With no means of swift communication or easeful passage between the two countries, American English merely trickled back into its source to begin with. But as the balance of power between Britain and her former colonies shifted, as America ascended to military, economic, cultural and technological dominance, that trickle swelled to a torrent, washing away any kind of quality control.

COOKIES and CLOSETS

Throughout the 19th Century, Engel contends, “the Americanisms that permeated the British language did so largely on merit, because they were more expressive, more euphonious, sharper and cleverer than their British counterparts”. What word-lover could resist the likes of ‘ornery’, ‘boondoggle’ or ‘scuttlebutt’? That long ago ceased to be the case, leaving us with words and phrases that reek of euphemism – ‘passing’ instead of dying – or that mock their user with meaninglessness, like the non-existent Rose Garden that political reporters decided No 10 had to have, just because the White House has one (it doesn’t exactly have one either, not in the strictest sense, but that’s a whole other story).

Call me a snob, but there’s also the fact that some American neologisms are just plain ungainly. I recently picked up a promising new American thriller to find ‘elevator’ used as a verb in the opening chapter. As in, Ahmed was ‘elevatoring’ towards the top of his profession in Manhattan.

Nowadays, no sphere of expression remains untouched. Students talk of campus and semesters. Magistrates, brainwashed by endless CSI reruns, ask barristers “Will counsel please approach the bench?” We uncheck boxes in a vain effort to avoid being inundated with junk mail that, when it arrives regardless, we move to trash.

It’s understandable, of course. Sometimes, American words just seem more glamorous. Who wants to live in a flat, a word redolent of damp problems and unidentifiable carpet stains, a word that just sounds – well, flat – when they could make their home in an apartment instead? Sometimes that glamour is overlain with bracing egalitarianism – it’s a glamour untainted by our perennial national hang-up, class.

Take ‘movie’. The word has all the glitz of Hollywood and none of the intellectual pretensions (or so it might be argued) of the word ‘film’, which increasingly suggests subtitles (‘foreign-language film’ is one of the few instances in which the f-word doesn’t seem interchangeable with its American counterpart – ‘foreign-language movie’ just sounds odd). Other times they fill a gap, naming something that British English speakers have been unable to decide on, as is increasingly the case with ATM, a boring but brief alternative to cash point, cash machine, hole in the wall. Also to be factored in is what Engel dubs “Britain’s cultural cringe”, which predisposes us to embrace the foreign.

It’s often pointed out that plenty of these Americanisms were British English to begin with – we exported them, then imported them back. A commonly made case in point is ‘I guess’, which crops up in Chaucer. When Dr Johnson compiled his seminal 1755 dictionary, ‘gotten’ was still in use as a past participle of ‘get’. But as Engel points out, good old English is not good new English. Moreover, his beef isn’t really to do with authenticity; it’s more to do with our unthinking complicity. Because it’s not just the cookies and the closets, or even the garbage, it’s the insidiousness of it all. We’ve already reached the point where most of us can no longer tell whether a word is an Americanism or not. By 2120, he suggests, American English will have absorbed the British version entirely. As he puts it, “The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted”. (Continue reading)


RECOMMENDED YouTube CHANNEL: How to be BRITISH - Eat Sleep Dream English

🔺IMPORTANT: This is NOT an advert! This is just my honest (and free) opinion.

I've already recommended other interesting posts, tools and videos, and I'll keep on doing so in the future as long as I come across things worth recommending😄

Why do I recommend this channel? Simply because I like Tom's approach to teachinghe teaches fresh modern English, the kind that you don't usually get in textbooks, and he's fun! I think other lovers of English may also enjoy his videos and find them useful - that's all😉

Below are just a few - ENJOY!

How to be BRITISH | 5 Easy Steps (5:41 minutes)

12 Britishisms YOU NEED TO KNOW | British English Expressions
(6:44 minutes)

REPORTED SPEECH What Native English Speakers Really Say!
(6:55 minutes)

What British People REALLY MEAN with Joel & Lia (13:24 minutes)

My Guide to London | Camden Town (5:05 minutes)

How To Make The Perfect Cup Of English Tea (6:05 minutes)

🔗 GO TO TOM'S PLAYLISTS
🔗 WATCH MORE VIDEOS

WHAT DO THEY REALLY MEAN?

From Friday: The Experiment, BBC Learning English - [Images: GETTY IMAGES]

'What They Really Mean' shows how misunderstandings can be caused when people say things indirectly.

Each of these 5 episodes shows you how to avoid these misunderstandings.


🎬 EPISODE 1 ⇒ QUESTIONS AS WARNINGS 
Mark can't understand why Chloe is asking about his hat. She's trying to warn him about something - but he just doesn't understand. Watch the video and learn how to tell when someone's questions are trying to warn you.


(For a full transcript, a quiz and much more, CLICK HERE)

🎬 EPISODE 2 ⇒ SUGGESTIONS AS INSTRUCTIONS
Mark can't understand why Chloe is annoyed. She had been giving him instructions - but he just didn't realise. Watch the video and learn how to tell when someone's suggestions are really instructions.


(For a full transcript, a quiz and much more, CLICK HERE)

🎬 EPISODE 3 ⇒ EUPHEMISTIC FEEDBACK
Emily didn't like Mark's ideas. She tried to tell him, but he didn't realise. Watch the video to find out why. It shows you how to identify euphemistic feedback. This is where people try to say to something negative without causing offence.

(For a full transcript, a quiz and much more, CLICK HERE)

🎬 EPISODE 4 ⇒ SARCASM
The British summer's fantastic, isn't it? Mark thinks Chloe is trying to trick him. Watch the video to find out why he got it wrong. It shows you how to identify sarcasm. This is where people say the opposite to what they mean.

(For a full transcript, a quiz and much more, CLICK HERE)

🎬EPISODE 5 ⇒ DISGUISED REQUESTS
Olivia's had a house party. It's late at night and now she just wants everyone to leave so she can go to bed. She uses disguised requests to let Mark know she wants him to leave. But he doesn't realise.

Disguised requests are questions people ask to gently suggest that another person should do something. Olivia says "Is it 10 o'clock?" but what she means is, "go home." Watch the video to find out how to identify disguised requests.
(For a full transcript, a quiz and much more, CLICK HERE)


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