What spelling, grammar or semantics rules have been lost in your lifetime?
a month ago by Dagobah to c/asklemmy
Language is always changing. At one point 'an apron' was 'a napron' while words like 'literally' are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?
Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!
You're being downvoted, but I suspect you're actually correct. A note about the act of decimation: it wasn't just killing every tenth soldier. It was that the other nine soldiers were forced to kill the tenth. It was an absolutely brutal act where soldiers were forced to kill their friends and comrades.
It makes sense that saying an act is as brutal as decimation would then come to replace the word itself over time. That happens pretty frequently in language evolution.
More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.
We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks; however, now it seems to be the user's choice of inside or outside. And I have to admit that most of the time when I’m using quotes, it seems more logical to me to place the punctuation outside of them.
We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks;
Isn't this a US English thing? In India we were taught to close them like brackets - i.e., the one that opened last closes first. So
'Don't wait. I will come later.'
But
He said 'I will come later'.
Yeah, I still feel like I'm supposed to, but frequently I think it makes more sense to pull it outside if it isn't part of the quote. Putting it in the quotation makes it seem like it's associated with the quotation, when it may not be.
You know, I actually prefer that it be variable, but only when it serves a purpose.
Like, if Im quoting someone "I might want to indicate that they completed a sentence.", but also continue beyond it.
Loose and lose might as well be the same word these days. Drives me up a damn wall.
That and "POV" doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore. Also drives me up a wall.
Yeah, I remember an exchange I had, where someone asked what POV means I answered with Point of View and some spoiled Z started laughing, saying I outed myself, but as table top gamer... that was always the abbreviation we used.
I assume that kid thought it was only for porn. Ironically, they are the ones who outed themselves, though who gives a shit? Everyone watches porn.
POV has meant point of view for far longer than porn has used it. I have no idea of the origins, but it's old. I remember using it in English classes to describe how stories were written, for example, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a modern thing.
Hey, maybe they have a specific wall up which they are driven!
This drives me up that wall
What…what does POV mean now??
POV: I am confused
wait what is that supposed to mean? (i'm not a native english speaker, might be why i don't get it)
Just demonstrating an incorrect use of POV 😅
Breathe and breath too...
Australian English language is now largely Americanised, a process that started in the post-war era is now mostly complete.
I'm not really bothered by it or anything, but it's been interesting to see it shift even over my lifetime.
Americans don't use pram though, we say stroller
Yeah, pram is a British term. Or pushchair.
'Programme' is mostly replaced by 'program'.
We can still pronounce it correctly (with an O like 'pronounce' or 'proclaim') so there's that
Y’all still got dual carriageways over there?
Is that an Australian-ism? I don't remember it ever coming up in conversation with my American or British friends.
Yeah it’s a divided highway. I got directions once that included what I heard as a “jewel carriageway” and had just a very confusing time getting that clarified.
Bonnet
Australian
Uwotm8
I don't understand the pusher/pram one at all.
Yes, but we got the good aussie slang!
Like, "no worries". Fucking love it.
Literally is still understood, it just gets misused.
Going in a bit of a different direction, emojis and things like /s are well understood now, which is an addition.
I wonder if some day in the future emojis will make their way from casual conversation into business? I guess I already use things like 👍 in semi formal work chats - it's especially useful as a way of ensuring a message isn't read sarcastically or passive aggressively. LLMs seem more than happy to plop an emoji or two into a document.
Speaking of AI I'm already noticing that poor spelling, slang and the like are almost signifiers of a human. I wonder if ways of talking that distinguish us from AI will become more common or more valuable?
Actually, when I think about it. I rarely see people complaining about emojis at work. Ironically if there's one place that people hate emojis it's Reddit or Lemmy 😅.
Do you speak another language than English? I'd be fascinated to know if similar language battles are happening in other languages.
Yes! Well, I am from India, so... I speak multiple languages with people who are comfortable in their own and yes, there is a lot of language battles in India too, especially Search up Hindi Imposition if you're interested.
If so, that's great. Literally was taken; sometimes you're trying to communicate something that sounds figurative, or like hyperbole, but it's not.
"begging the question". it's not the same as "bringing up a question", it means assuming your conclusion is true in the course of an argument
To be fair, that original meaning is illogical (as in, the meaning doesn't follow from the literal words used), so it's not surprising that people misused it to have a more logical meaning.
(wiki says) it comes from Greek to Latin to English in the 16th century, so I'm sure it suffers a bit in modern transfusion.
I suppose the word "boomer" has changed meaning very quickly. It rarely gets used anymore to refer to actual boomers (people born just after WW2) and instead now can refer either vaguely to anyone older than 30, or anyone with an antiquated/problematic notion of social norms.
From my perspective, literally being used for emphasis does not actually change its meaning, it’s simply hyperbole.
If you complain that you’ve been “waiting for hours”, even though it’s been 45 minutes, that doesn’t change the meaning of “hours”, you’re just exaggerating.
Hyperbole is a stylistic element; style is a completely different level of language than grammar/spelling/semantics (word meanings). As another example of style, ending a sentence with a preposition is grammatically correct but stylistically not recommended.
The OED actually includes the definition of literally as being what used to be the opposite of its definition nowadays, so I think that it does count as an auto-antonym (a word that means both itself, and the opposite of itself)
I agree, but there was a period in the '00s, or maybe early '10s, where the meaning was changing because you only ever saw it mean "figuratively", to the point where dictionaries included both meanings. I think it's settled back to its original meaning now though.
I miss double spaces after periods.
It hasn't changed, you were just taught an overly specific application and not taught that it was such.
We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.
Autocorrect on Microsoft products turns double-space into single space by default. Gotta turn that shit of every time, it’s very frustrating.
Don't do that unless it's a monotype font, please.
Sincerely, typesetters everywhere.
Why not? I want to have more white space between my sentences than I do between words in the same sentence. I’m writing emails, business crap, and Lemmy posts; nothing that’s going to see any love from a typesetter. Is there some more appropriate way to get what I want than hitting the spacebar twice between sentences?
Print publishing has 500 years of convention built on trial and error.
As a person who learned to type on a typewriter, and then became a typesetter and publisher, and now does a lot of editing, double spaces are only of use in a monospace type face where there is no kerning possible.
Otherwise, type with variable spaces between the letters plus variable letter sizes is physically harder to read when there are extra gaps between the sentences, despite the way you were trained (by boomers, probably) to type.
In pre-secondary education I was taught to double-space, but post I was told to single IIRC. I prefer single personally.
Interestingly, typing two spaces on my phone is replaced by a period and a single space. It's like a vestigial mechanic from that practice. It's aware of the context of what a double space was used for, but it serves a totally different purpose to not have to type a period.
Presently used to mean "soon" or "in a bit" but now means "happening right now"
The meaning of bemused is similar to "befuddled", but it's more often used as if it means "amused"
It used to be a firm rule that you mustn't end a sentence in a proposition.
"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - attributed to Churchill
While not totally gone, German's genitive case (which is used to show ownership) is becoming less and less common. They have both the genetive case as well as their equivalent of " 's " - which is just "s," if you're wondering. Example:
Der Herr der Ringe.
The Lord of the Rings. It would normally be "die Ringe," but it becomes "der" in the genetive case.
Another transition in German is that the "formal you" is being used less and less frequently. I understand this is the case for a few other European languages as well.
Interesting! Thanks for a non english perspective. Is German language development Influenced by widespread english competency? Are Germans becoming less fussy about certain rules in favour of some of English's simpler or more flexible constructs? (Not to suggest that English isn't a Byzantine mess of a language itself!)
Unfortunately, I'm not a native German speaker. So, take this with a grain of salt.
I will say that the German language has always been open to loan words from other languages. And, according to my German teacher (who is native), the biggest change recently in that regard is NOT how loan words are accepted BUT how quickly they are accepted these days. New loan words are being added all the time, especially by young people. He said that generally the word will be accepted as it is at first, and then over time it well become more "germanified" and used more like native words. He said this process used to take decades but now it can happen in less than a year. An example of a germanified English loan word is "chatten" which means "to chat," just like English. Ich chatte, du chattest, wir chatten. (I chat, you chat, we chat.)
I believe the simplification of grammatical structures (like the abandonment of genetive) has been going on slowly over centuries and is mostly unrelated to contact with English speakers. But, there is likely some influence there.
Really interesting stuff! It just goes to show that even without 'authorities' such as the French Language Academy, loan words end up becoming modified and molded by their adoptive language. I'm learning Japanese and it has so many loan words going all the way back to the dutch. Some are barely recognisable for example computer is パソコン = pasokon = personal computer.
Pour one out for the Oxford Comma .
Let's eat Grandma
Commas save lives!
Us that technically a missing Oxford comma, or just a missing comma?
The grandma quote is a missing comma in general, but there's another reply with a missing Oxford Comma.
Although punctuation is waning, I'm willing to spend the time to use it.
The rich couple, me and ScarJo donated ten thousand dollars to a local charity school.
That's typical of her relationships.
would of literally their
Literally Literally
People no longer double-space after sentences. No one cares that further compares metaphorical distance and farther compares physical distance. Most people seem to think that joining two independent clauses with a comma (a comma splice) is just fine. Things are now done on accident instead of by accident. Compute used to be something you did; now, it's something you rent. People seem to have given up on less being used for uncountable things and fewer for countable things. Now they just use less for everything. People these days are enamored 'by' something instead of with it (or of it, for our British friends).
Ending sentences with propositions, and getting them jumbled around. My work does it in their advertisements and i cry every time.
"See what classes you can register for." Or modifying it to be worse; "see what classes you can register for fast"
propositions
Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?
also i fear that "comfort" is losing the battle to "comfortability"
said often in an office context, not a youth thing in my experience
Plenty of bad grammar and speling to go around.
30 years ago fewer people with literacy problems were publicly and obsessively defacing literary norms.
Ain't ain't a word.
It is now.
Pronouns getting weird, especially when and is added, like "for him and I" or "her and I's house".
Also excetera for etcetera and mischievious for mischievous
I get irrationally angry any time I hear "I's". I can tolerate most other grammar issues, but something about that particular butchery of English drives me up the wall.
It's just indolence.
It's like people who put an S on the end of 'e-mail' to pluralize it.
"Reticent" used to mean 'reluctance to speak', or, 'holding your tongue', but in the last decade I saw it being used more frequently as a straight up synonym for 'reluctance'. I wonder if people maybe think it's a more authoritative sounding word?
It's not a change of convenience or cultural drift, just a sign of people reading less and subconsciously trying to hide it, I think.
Unique coming to just mean unusual.
I don't know if this fits the question, but in Brazil the "Portuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990" only started to take effect in 2009 (after I was born), in a transition state, and in 2015 it became official and obligatory.
The changes that I still fumble with are diacritics (e.g. "Idéia" -> "Ideia") and hyphens (e.g. "contra-regra" -> "contrarregra").
Most definitely fits the question, also TIL about the PLOA. Are Brazilian and continental Portuguese different enough to be called dialects? Given its much larger population does Brazil have an outsized influence on Portuguese language development through media?
does Brazil have an outsized influence on Portuguese language development through media?
I don't know since I only interact with other Brazilians, though from what I can remember of early to mid 2010s internet, European Portuguese was preferred over Brazilian Portuguese (as in, when a website or app had a PT translation it'd wouldn't be PT-BR).
Nowadays, I believe both are commonly available.
Are Brazilian and continental Portuguese different enough to be called dialects?
The most common way to refer to Brazilian Portuguese that I've seen is that it's a variant of European Portuguese, I'm not a linguist so I don't know the difference between a variant and a dialect.
Interesting, thanks for taking the time to reply! How do European Portuguese sound to the Brazilian ear? Like, as an Australian, New Zealanders sound sort of plucky and goofy to me, Americans are brash and loud, Canadians are laid-back, received English sounds polite or formal etc. I'm sure they all think Australians sound like sandpaper 😅
I'm bad at describing it, so hear it for yourself!
Literally and Crescendo are my vocabulary pet peeves. Both have stupidly evolved to include definitions that mean the exact opposite of their true meanings.
Literally is annoying, but Crescendo is impossible. That is a specific musical term with an unalterable meaning. It means a gradual increase in volume, but it has come to mean a climax. Something will be described as "it rose to a crescendo," and that is simply wrong. Something can crescendo to a climax, but not the other way around. If you change it to mean the climax, you can't crescendo to a crescendo, s what's the word for gradually increasing the volume?
Besides, it's a musical term, and musicians will define musical terms, not illiterate civilians.
And if Literally can also mean "similar to," then what word can be used to literally mean Literally?
I was one of the first years to have the new spelling rules.
It used to be, that a letter appearing more than twice in direct sequence would be cut to just twice. But that was lifted and is now just how many it should normally be. Examples: Schifffahrt, Brennnessel, Seeelefant.
It used to be, that "dass" could also be spelt "daß", but the rules for "ss" and "ß" were made clearer and more concise.
They also changed the way words could be split at the end of a line. If there was a double consonant in-between the syllables that were to split, the first syllable would take both consonants but now they are split evenly.
immer is split im-mer and not imm-er
But ck makes an exception: knackig is kna-ckig instead of old knak-kig
In US usage, it used to be that a situation could be "fraught with" complications, or hidden meaning, or difficulty, but it had to be "fraught with" something.
These days, the British style of saying that the situation is simply "fraught" seems to be way more popular than before.
Efficiency at work i guess. Maybe some cunning linguist can explain.
@lemmy.ml
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
Icon by @Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
go to feed...
@lemmy.ml
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
Icon by @Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
go to feed...
“Decimating” no longer means killing ten percent as the Romans did; now it is used to mean the killing of a majority, so it’s close to the opposite of its original meaning.
save