Crunchy, sick etc etc. Whole sub-culture of non-obvious alternative meanings. Funnily enough I'm OK with that in my crumbly late 60's.
But "So..." and "off of" really grinds my gears.
But "So..." and "off of" really grinds my gears.
It's now gotten so bad that teachers no longer need to be literate. At least that's how New Jersey has gone.
https://www.campussafetymagazine.co...-required-to-pass-basic-literacy-test/165479/
I'm from the US, but lived for 18th months in west London before moving to France. Some moths later I was working in Beaujolais and met some Brits. They told me that I didn't sound much like a Yank. I said "Yes, I lived in England for a bit." "Oh, west London, was it?" So yeah, you can tell.
There is a wide range of regional accents in the UK, some very difficult to understand. I'm from the North East of the country originally, where the local accent is called Geordie. There are whole phrases that are indistinguishable from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, from when they invaded the North East of the UK and Scotland around 800AD.
Divvent coup ower - Don't trip and fall over. Cowp yer creels - Do a somersault. You get the gist.
However there are fine differences even in that. Northumberland has a much harder accent, where as those from the Durham area a much softer one. Go 40 miles down the coast from Newcastle to Hartlepool and the accent starts to morph into mild Yorkshire accent.
There is even a unique version of Geordie called Pitmatic, used by coal miners in and around the North East. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitmatic , although most of those words listed are ones I recognise and used.
An even more impenetrable accent is from Cornwall, with a strange and wonderful lexicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_dialect
No hint in any of those regional, strange and wonderful accents and lexicons is "off of" or "So..." or "gotten"
What’s the difference between linguistic diversity as in different dialects and accents in the UK and say Americans that say ‘y’all’ and ‘gotten’?
The great thing about English is it’s changing all the time and the vocabulary is absorbing new words either made up on the street so to speak or from other languages.
If you want to hear the filthiest (as in swearing), impenetrably slang ridden English in the world, you need to go to South Africa where it has pulled in words from Afrikaans, some local black languages, and from Asia via the slave population taken there from the late 1600s through to early 1800s. The written English from that part of the world also has its quirks and after I arrived in the UK more than 30 years ago a few people remarked on it.
The great thing about English is it’s changing all the time and the vocabulary is absorbing new words either made up on the street so to speak or from other languages.
If you want to hear the filthiest (as in swearing), impenetrably slang ridden English in the world, you need to go to South Africa where it has pulled in words from Afrikaans, some local black languages, and from Asia via the slave population taken there from the late 1600s through to early 1800s. The written English from that part of the world also has its quirks and after I arrived in the UK more than 30 years ago a few people remarked on it.
Local dialects and weird words (emmet, wazzock, etc) don't count as degradation of English. It strikes me that degradation could be calculated from the number of words that could be excised from a communication without losing any of its meaning. Thus, management-speak would instantly qualify as degradation because it is deliberately meaningless (although possibly grammatical and correctly spelled). Conversely, there might just be a torrent of misspelled ungrammatical words that merely indicates that the speaker wants to draw attention to themselves. That's what annoys me; meaningless wittering.
y'all is fine by me, being a contraction of "you all". Gotten is uniquely used in American English, although there is some evidence that is making inroads in the UK.
See for example from The Britannica Dictionary: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/difference-between-have-got-and-have-gotten
Both my adult son and daughter are very good with written English and both had their work 'incorrectly corrected' by teachers at school. They'd come home and ask us and we'd find the teachers were wrong!
Worse, my daughter went on to university and had her grammar 'corrected' again by a lecturer when it was not wrong. But then, she commenced a Ph.D and it happened again, this time by a supervising Professor.
The culprits were all comparatively young.
Who can forget Dan Quale visiting a school in full media coverage, and incorrectly correcting a child's correct spelling of potato by putting an e on the end.
Although this was in 1992, the gaffe made him an object of ridicule.
Although this was in 1992, the gaffe made him an object of ridicule.
Yes, why not? I have no problem with colloquial usage, natural speech, and the like. It beats me why anyone does, really.
I also think good writers of fiction have a finely tuned ear for language and a love of the way it is used - they certainly put a lot of work into rendering common speech. I personally don't believe their intention is to patronize, belittle, or to hold up the ignorance of others.
My feeling about such writers is that they are masters of their craft, they understand and use language better than we could hope to, and they're consequently less blinkered and more relaxed than many of us (see upthread) about grammar, style, and usage. Their writing is precise without being prissy.
I mean, not exactly. Dickens put those words into the mouths of English characters. Other writers used it too.
1. Sometimes in speech:
SUFFOLK.
How cam’st thou so?
SIMPCOX.
A fall off of a tree.
(Shakespeare)
2. And sometimes not:
I carried two hatchets to try if I could not cut a piece off of the roll of lead, by placing the edge of one hatchet, and driving it with the other. (Daniel Defoe)
Prayed to God for the first time since the storm off of Hull, but scarce knew what I said, or why; my thoughts being all confused. (Daniel Defoe)
One would have thought I could not have had the least reflection upon my mind of my circumstance while I was making this boat, but I should have immediately thought how I should get it into the sea; but my thoughts were so intent upon my voyage over the sea in it, that I never once considered how I should get it off of the land (Daniel Defoe)
I fixed my umbrella also in a step at the stern, like a mast, to stand over my head, and keep the heat of the sun off of me (Daniel Defoe)
Upon the 4th a determined effort was made by about a thousand of them under General Schoeman to turn the left flank of the British, and at dawn it was actually found that they had eluded the vigilance of the outposts and had established themselves upon a hill to the rear of the position. They were shelled off of it, however, by the guns of O Battery, and in their retreat across the plain they were pursued by the 10th Hussars and by one squadron of the Inniskillings, who cut off some of the fugitives. (Arthur Conan Doyle).
There you go: used by English and Scottish writers in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. Not really a modern abomination, and not rejected by editors.
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I think the consensus that people imagine applies to rules of grammar and "correct" patterns of use is actually only seen in spelling. In the modern era - say, from the 19th century on - we can generally agree on the spelling of a word: most are spelled one way only; some are spelled two ways due to an American (or more rarely, other country's) variant, and a few words, but not all that many, may have more than two spellings. But essentially we can all accept that book is spelled book and station is spelled station and work is spelled work. Yet we certainly can't all settle on the same pronunciation!
Grammar and usage are much more flexible than spelling, but some people won't concede that two, three, or more ways of saying it or of writing it can all be correct. They particularly dislike anything they regard as sloppy, which is often the unfamiliar, the generational, or that which occurs outside the horizons defined by their schooling in a very specific time and place - forty, fifty or sixty years ago...
I came to NYC for college from the midwest as a teenager. I could readily pick out the accents of Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens after one semester. Within the boroughs of NYC there existed a caste system of accents. Curious, however, one of the Jesuit priests could pick out the accents within the boroughs by the parish church the guys and gals had attended in their youth!
My wife (whom I met in college) had the misfortune to take organic chemistry with a Scotsman professor who criticized her "south Bronx Italian accent". He'd probably get canned today.
My wife (whom I met in college) had the misfortune to take organic chemistry with a Scotsman professor who criticized her "south Bronx Italian accent". He'd probably get canned today.
Dialects of languages are very common European languages, also, in Belgium, be the french speaking part (Wallonia and Brussels), the dutch speaking part (Flanders) or the german speaking part (the east kantons) all villages have their own accent, and every neighbourhood in bigger towns and cities also. And altough we speak the same language in different dialects, a lot of people from Limburg (the eastern part of Flanders) can't understand the westflemish dialect (from the coastal province) or reverse. On tv the dilaects go subtitled for that in standard dutch (that everybody understand but almost nobody really speak, we speak our dialects or wattered down version closer to standard Dutch. And that is only in a region of about 13.788 km² (smaller than most US states). And the Dutch they speak in the Netherlands is also very different, with a lot of strong dialects that are sometimes difficult to understand for us flemish dutch speaking people in Belgium.
On the french speaking part it's just the same, with 4 big different dialect groups of French, Picard (incls Chti'mi), Wallon, Lorraine and Francien (Luxemburgs french), all belonging to the Oil group of french dialects. But each of those groups is divided in dozens of subdialects that can differ a lot within a group. The Picard from Lessines is very different than that of Tournai or Mons that both also differ a lot. And if you look on the map, those cities are not that far appart.
So in Belgium, those dialects have a strong influence on how the local variation of the standard language is spoken, and also more and more, how it's written locally by many. For me, they hear immediatly i'm from Bruges, even when i try to speak standard dutch, due to my accent, but also on how i bend the standard dutch in a westflemish way. My french is very much coloured by from who i learned it, that are people from Brussels and Roubaix (France), and not the most educated people. So my french is very much coloured by Bruxellois (Brussels french) and Roubaignot, the dialect spoken in Roubaix, France (subdialect of Chti'mi).
On the french speaking part it's just the same, with 4 big different dialect groups of French, Picard (incls Chti'mi), Wallon, Lorraine and Francien (Luxemburgs french), all belonging to the Oil group of french dialects. But each of those groups is divided in dozens of subdialects that can differ a lot within a group. The Picard from Lessines is very different than that of Tournai or Mons that both also differ a lot. And if you look on the map, those cities are not that far appart.
So in Belgium, those dialects have a strong influence on how the local variation of the standard language is spoken, and also more and more, how it's written locally by many. For me, they hear immediatly i'm from Bruges, even when i try to speak standard dutch, due to my accent, but also on how i bend the standard dutch in a westflemish way. My french is very much coloured by from who i learned it, that are people from Brussels and Roubaix (France), and not the most educated people. So my french is very much coloured by Bruxellois (Brussels french) and Roubaignot, the dialect spoken in Roubaix, France (subdialect of Chti'mi).
Saunder Simpcox is a fraudster and something of an idiot in Henry VI part II. So he talks all sorts of rubbish. He says he and his wife are from Berwick. Gloucester finally says "Let them be whipped through every market-town, till they come to Berwick, from whence they came". Berwick is in the Scottish borders, and there are a lot of market towns to go through.
Simpcox indicates Simple Idiot with cox being a shortened version of coxcombe, which means fool or simpleton - and Simpcox lives up to that.
I've fairly recently seen all three Henry VI plays, so know first hand the initial comedic characters of Simpcox and his wife, but it ends with a hard edge.
Dafoe was writing in the late 1600's and early 1700's when - as with the original folios of Shakespeare's work - spelling and sentence construction was somewhat odd by today's standards.
The particular quote by Conan Doyle makes complete sense in terms of the previous sentence.
Perfectly acceptable and used without controversy in the US. Might be different where you are.