Insertions, deletions and updations

[Coalman]

I thought the Oxford English Dictionary is the defacto standard for the English language. There is a body that authorise what goes into the dictionary and there are certain rules that new words must follow.

Did no body else see Balderdash and Piffle?

[dang65]

I thought the Oxford English Dictionary is the defacto standard for the English language. There is a body that authorise what goes into the dictionary and there are certain rules that new words must follow.

Well, the OED includes lots of "rules" which very few people ever follow. It has always used the -ize ending for words like characterize, itemize etc which I don't suppose many "authorities" in English bother adhering to. The OED also, famously, insists that the correct spelling of "Shakespeare" is "Shakspere".

The OED is just a dictionary, albeit a massively impressive one, and it adds new words each time it is republished. I'm sure it has its own guidelines, but they are no more "official" than the Plain English Society or the Queen's English Society or many others in between.

As for the nonsense about American English... a lot of "American" words were originally English words which continued to be used in America but died out in England. Years later - in some case centuries later - these words came back to England via American movies etc and were attacked for being "American". There are also words like "gotten" which we've stopped using but the Americans still use, while we use "forgotten" which they don't use.

It's a worldwide language with dialects. How many words are there for a bread roll across Britain? They're all English though (as in English language).

Language should be free. You might as well try to impose a particular gait with which people must walk, or a particular pitch at which everyone must speak, or a uniform everyone must wear. Just relax and let people speak however they want. You'll find you suddenly have a lot more free time.

[expat]

Well, the OED includes lots of "rules" which very few people ever follow. It has always used the -ize ending for words like characterize, itemize etc which I don't suppose many "authorities" in English bother adhering to. The OED also, famously, insists that the correct spelling of "Shakespeare" is "Shakspere".

The OED is right on both counts. The -ize ending is appropriate for those words where it is a suffix derived from Greek. Of course when the word is derived from Latin via French, -ise is correct; and analyse is different because it is not the same suffix.

Personally I'd allow any of the sixteen or so spellings that the Bard himself used, but Shakespere is more English.

[lilelvis2000]

No it makes you sound like a retard of the first order, it is one of the words that really really gets to me. It ranks right up there with seeing "coz" in technical documents (coz is not a word ffs what were you thinking putting it in a ******* business document!!!!).

Call me old fashioned but I like to think that our language deserves a little respect and that people coming over here should use it properly rather than making up words that they think sound "cool" or are in thier minds "logical".

How far do you think I would get if I went over to France, or Germany and started butchering thier language because it thought it was "cool" or "logical"????

Ooooh. you're just so "stiff upper lip" and all, innit?

[dang65]

The OED is right on both counts. The -ize ending is appropriate for those words where it is a suffix derived from Greek. Of course when the word is derived from Latin via French, -ise is correct; and analyse is different because it is not the same suffix.

"Right" is one thing, but actual usage is quite another.

And this business of basing the "rules" of our language against the rules of languages which have been dead for centuries is just absurd. People have got into a complete tangle trying to organise their grammar in that way. One writer, whose name I forget, famously used to translate his work into Latin and back again in order to get the word order supposedly "correct". Why?

In real English we chop Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, French etc into all sorts of combinations and only the most anally retentive actually give a toss.

Yes, having common standards makes sense, of course, or we'd be in a right mess, but those standards come from usage, everyday speech and writing. They come about by tacit agreement, not by official rules. Once again, there is no official organisation which governs the English language, and there never has been. And even the OED is routinely ignored by most people, including professional writers.

[dang65]

Ooooh. you're just so "stiff upper lip" and all, innit?

"Stiff upper lip" originated in America, by-the-way so kindly desist from using it in future.

[Gonzo]

I disagree completely. We already have one bastardised version of English (American English) out there and we do not need another!

English will evolve as time moves forward, but resisting made up words brought into the language by people who do not speak the language and bastardise it to make it easier for them is the right thing to do.

Our language is part of our national identity and we should be protecting it rather than pandering to various people who cannot be bothered to learn it correctly. I would not expect to go to a country that speaks another language and then bastardise it to make it easier for me and then expect them to conform, I would expect to be treated with contempt and derision and as far as I'm concerned this is how we should treat people that try to bring in words like updation, needful and blatant inaccuracies like "coz".

I have picked up somebody on the use of "coz" in a document before and they were surprised to find out it wasn't a real word, they had heard it said so often htye thought it was the correct spelling and were quite mortified when it was explained that it did not exist. Said person no longer uses it in documents now that they know that they should really be writing because and as a result they have learnt something about our language and thier documents look a damn sight more professional.

I would suggest that people who do not care how words are spelt or grammar is presented are likely to be people who fall into one of three categories:

• Not native English speakers
• Not well educated
• Not well read

The last being the most likely, as people who are not well read have not learned to appreciate the various intracacies of well written English, and are therefore unlikely to be able to derive pleasure from well formed prose.

Wheeling out "the English language is alwaya evolving" as an argument is feeble justification for the corruption of our mother tounge at best and a lazy trollish answer provided by somebody who cannot be bother to form a coherent argument at worst....

Carm down! Carm down!

I find myself in an unformfortable position because I have always been upset to see scant regards paid to the "rules" of the language.

As I get older, I am beginning to discover that "the rules" you learn when you are a child, are in fact only recent phenomena, and that life for human beings is more transient than we would probably like.

There is a fascinating migration museum in Rejkavik - I went to it one year ago and English people were still welcome then, which charts the movement of people across northern Europe over the past 1,000 years.

One of the things that they have researched is that the languages of the northern germans, the english and old norse, were not the same but were close enough that they would have ben able to understand each other.

Our modern day rules seem to make that more difficult.


So relax, and let the language change around you.

I predict that in a few more thousand years time, there will be one global language.

[lilelvis2000]

"Stiff upper lip" originated in America, by-the-way so kindly desist from using it in future.

What about "innit", innit?

[ThomasSoerensen]

I disagree completely. We already have one bastardised version of English (American English) out there and we do not need another!

English will evolve as time moves forward, but resisting made up words brought into the language by people who do not speak the language and bastardise it to make it easier for them is the right thing to do.

Our language is part of our national identity and we should be protecting it rather than pandering to various people who cannot be bothered to learn it correctly. I would not expect to go to a country that speaks another language and then bastardise it to make it easier for me and then expect them to conform, I would expect to be treated with contempt and derision and as far as I'm concerned this is how we should treat people that try to bring in words like updation, needful and blatant inaccuracies like "coz".

I have picked up somebody on the use of "coz" in a document before and they were surprised to find out it wasn't a real word, they had heard it said so often they thought it was the correct spelling and were quite mortified when it was explained that it did not exist. Said person no longer uses it in documents now that they know that they should really be writing because and as a result they have learnt something about our language and thier documents look a damn sight more professional.

I would suggest that people who do not care how words are spelt or grammar is presented are likely to be people who fall into one of three categories:

• Not native English speakers
• Not well educated
• Not well read

The last being the most likely, as people who are not well read have not learned to appreciate the various intricacies of well written English, and are therefore unlikely to be able to derive pleasure from well formed prose.

Wheeling out "the English language is always evolving" as an argument is feeble justification for the corruption of our mother toungue at best and a lazy trollish answer provided by somebody who cannot be bother to form a coherent argument at worst....

fixed those for you

[expat]

...only the most anally retentive actually give a toss.