Grrr....just saw this again. Drives me nuts!

The one that I keep seeing that drives me nuts is mixing 'lose' and 'loose'...

Like .breath'/'breath' itisn't even because they sound alike

 

Yes. That's another one. And like breath and breathe, they are also spelled differently.

I'm sorry, but there are only 26 letters in the English/American alphabet. There are only so many ways they can be arranged. If there are similar arrangements in different words, we need to learn them and stop acting as if it doesn't matter. How much more time will go by before lettuce and letters get to be interchangeable—hey, you can use either one, because beginning a word with lett means that whatever comes after that doesn't matter. Or cat and cut, because hey, the first letter and the last letter are the SAME, so the middle doesn't matter.

Just. Learn. The. Correct. Spellings.

 

Seat yourself, be seated... sometimes seat is a verb, sometimes it's... whatever it is in the second example...

I'm not saying there isn't a "right" and "wrong" way to use these words, but there are definitely some quirks to the language.

 

There is a difference between using a verbified noun and just using the wrong word, though. If write for someone to go cloth themselves, because my mum's coming over, or type that someones breathe caught in their throat, it's just awkward and wrong. Not because of convention, but because it's not what I would actually say if I were saying it loud. Using the wrong written word to represent a spoken word is, well... wrong. It's like typing 'Nate of Americans', or 'Hall of Cost' to represent other other things that have perfectly legitimate words already attached to them.

 

And remember Spellcheck is not always your friend (as anyone who has trusted it on official letters at work will know...)

 

You wouldn't say 'be sitted,' would you? (I hope.) Or, "Your sit is the third one in the fifth row." Yeah, there's often a quirk in the English language, but the quirks have been incorporated into the language and have taken acceptable forms. This is different from people simply ignoring dictionary definitions and spellings because they want to—or don't actually know what the accepted forms are. Or reverting to the root word (breath) and using it to replace all forms of the word, or anything having to do with what the root word means.

I'm not concerned with quirkiness. I'm concerned with what is accepted as correct, in terms of our language usage.

My point is that—quirkiness or not—our language has standard acceptable usage. Sometimes there is a bit of leeway, sometimes not. (You can say "Please be seated." or "Please take a seat." Or "Please sit down." They all mean pretty much the same thing. But "Please be sitted," or "Please seat down" are not acceptable as correct English. No, it makes no actual sense, but there it is.)

If we aren't aware of the accepted standards, or decide that they're not worth bothering about, things can veer off course pretty badly. And quickly too, as we've been witnessing recently. (Their, they're, there, lose, loose, breath, breathe....) I have read online offerings on Facebook and in commentaries that are so out of whack that no, I have no idea what these people actually mean. I'm sure you have as well. This is a slippery slope we're on.

 

I'm not concerned with the specific instances here - I don't think they've risen to the level where they'd be considered dialect or adaptations - they're still just errors, I'd say.

But in general, language changes and evolves. We can clutch our pearls over it or we can relax and enjoy. We don't use "thee", "thy" and "thou" anymore, and, yes, I think some shades of meaning have been lost because of it, but other shades of meaning have been added in other areas, and during the transition phase I think there's a great potential to use the transition creatively and play with it.

In other words, I prefer the descriptivist approach to the prescriptivist approach. It's no fun to be mad at people all the time. ("mad" in it's current sense of "angry", not the older sense of "mentally ill".)

 

Actually, I think it can do more harm than good. It only picks up words that are not words, or words it's not familiar with. It does not pick up wrong usages, or spellings that form a different word from the one you intended. That's why I allowed the first few instances of 'breath' replacing 'breathe' to go past me. I figured somebody was probably depending on a spellchecker to catch their mistakes. I'm pretty astounded, to be honest, to discover that so many writers were unaware of the word 'breathe' at all.

 

Yeah, but the dictionaries change to reflect these changes, which is why it's a good idea to keep an up-to-date one handy.

Surely no dictionary has yet to decide that 'there, their and they're' are interchangeable. Or that 'lose' and 'loose' mean the same thing. Or that 'breath' replaces 'breathe,' when it's a verb. When they do, I'll rest my case. But the definition I got when I looked up 'breath' and 'breathe' was the current one appearing online, first in the google search. It's very up to date.

Sorry, but whatever we might think about evolving language, I don't think we're advocating total verbal anarchy. At least I'm not. And if anarchy doesn't rule, then something else does.

 

But if the dictionaries are descriptivist, they'll always trail a bit behind current usage. So there will be a stage when there's current usage that's not in keeping with the dictionaries...

 

To be frank, 'breath' and 'breathe' comes second to the use of 'who' and 'whom'. I mean, children aren't educated on when they should use these, and many a time I've heard a stranger say: 'To who does it belong?', when they should be saying: 'To whom does it belong?'

 

I use an old dictionary so I like my words to retain their original meanings.
Call me old school, and I don't like change.
I think Chancellor Gorkon's dying words sum up how I feel.

 

I'm fascinated, but not quite sure where you're going with this. I accept that language evolves. I also accept that, when a usage becomes fixed, that dictionaries will reflect it—sometimes faster than old fogeys like me are happy with.

However, are you willing to say that any mistaken meaning of a word or usage of grammar should never be resisted, or remarked upon, because any error may well end up evolving by osmosis into accepted usage? Many people can't tell the difference between there, their and they're any more, so we should just smile and allow them to choose whichever spelling they prefer?

So it's okay to publish a piece that's filled with common spelling and grammatical errors, because common errors are simply evolving language and we shouldn't be bothered by them?

If this is not okay, who draws the line at any given time? And where does it get drawn? And on what basis? I still maintain that language needs form in order to function. When that form is discarded or ignored, that language is not going to function very well. It certainly won't be able to communicate anything that's complicated, or has any depth to it.

I'm just curious. At what point does this whole thing start to fall apart? When teachers no longer understand basic English well enough to pass it to their students? Deprive one generation of its language skills, and we've lost something that's going to be very hard to get back.

 

I'm saying we can resist and remark upon anything we want, but we shouldn't get too worked up about it. There's no point, really.

We have posters on this board who rarely use capitals or punctuation, despite it being a rule of the board that proper writing be used. We can either get all worked up about that or we can shrug it off. If the posters are otherwise saying useful, intelligent things, I vote for shrugging it off.

ETA: Possibly we only have one regular poster who doesn't capitalize or use proper punctuation. I'm not sure. But I think the general idea stands.

 

I vote for getting worked up. Things that are worth saving are worth fighting for, in my opinion.

 

You better get your "report" button polished up, then.

 

Okay, this is getting way off what my original post was about.

If people deliberately choose a style of writing that's not grammatically correct, for some literary reason, that's up to them. I truly don't care. I assume ee cummings understood the rules pertaining to capitalisation of letters, and for his own reasons he chose to break them. It's not as if our language then evolved into accepting a lack of caps because of what he did. And oddly enough, it still seems to be a no-no on this forum, unless I missed @BayView's point.

I think I made my points quite clearly over the past few posts, and I can't think of anything to add to what I said. Anyway. Whatever. I'm off to bed.

 

Breathe, @jannert.

 

This whole thing about evolving breath to mean breathe, I'm not seeing it. Other than a few people (or a lot?) who simply haven't learned the proper spelling of a word doesn't seem to me to be the kind of thing that results in the spelling evolving toward the error.

Where's the movement? Where's the slang or abbreviated usage? What would cause the misspelled word to be adopted?

Not seeing any evidence of that.

 

How do you spell hyperventilate...?