Sigh, and huzzah!

[pecunium]

The most recent update to the OED has come out.

Me, I am neither a prescriptavist, nor a descriptivist. I am a cranky iconoclast. I know what I like, and why I like it. I suppose, were I to be pressed, I am a precisionist; with a splash of throwback.

This comes, I think, of being a widely read auto-didact. I am aware of strange words, long out of fashion. Add to this a mix of friends who are much the same, and toss in fluency in three other languages, and the mix of things I have strong opinions on (often at odds with mainstream usage) is long.

I am among those who are appalled that the most recent update includes chaise lounge.

But that is just the dictionary looking at what is (because the vast majority, seem to me, to be better able to recognise the proper use of the subject/object declensions of the interogative personal pronoun than to take issue with chaise longue being morphed into lounge [esp. because lounging is what people do in them). I would rather see that be a lounge chair/chaise longue, but there you go.

On the other hand, what warms the cockles of my miserly little heart is this addition.

"prozine: Chiefly science fiction, a professional magazine, as opposed to an amateur fanzine"

My ghetto has made a small piece of the big time.

Comments

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

the most recent update includes chaise lounge.

*collapses in horror, fans self, reaches for vinagrette*

IS NOTHING SACRED?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No. This is English dearie, the language of which james_nicoll, said, (and dead to rights) The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."

If that means we've twisted a perfectly good loan word, by eggcorn, to something new, well thems the breaks.

But I will stand the barricades, to my dying breath, in a valiant action to save the adverb.

One is doing well, not good, etc..

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

My personal barricade in this is teaching my children when to use 'more' and when to use 'fewer'. I may be overdoing it a bit though, my son corrected his grandmother the other day. "No, Grandmommy, it's fewer noodles, not less noodles! You can count noodles." I'm not sure what I'll do if he starts correcting the grammar of complete strangers...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

But that's a tricky one.

If someone were to offer me too many noodles/potatoes, etc. I might say, "no thank you, I'd like less of that."

Me, I loathe over, when someone means more than, or for a period of duration; which means saying, over [the course of] 30 years, is OK, but, "he was living in Vancouver for over 30 years," isn't.

TK

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I think it can reasonably be argued that Granny was using "noodles" in the sense of a collective mass, in which case "less" would be appropriate. ;-)

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

But, of course, one _can_ do good -- as in, for example, feeding the hungry with Food, Not Bombs, taking worn-out blankets to an Animal Shelter, or donating money to MoveOn.org. (YMMV)

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

Speaking of the OED, have you seen the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick?

http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

My approach to orthography & usage is much like yours, with, perhaps, a bit more whimsicality, conscious ambiguity when it seem amusing, and mood-of-the-moment. Not to mention the sometimes-practice of using uppercase initial letters to suggest some kind of obscure Emphasis, a highly-idiosyncratic use of punctuation (especially commas) based more on vocal delivery pauses (the origin of most "pointing"/punctuation, according to Moxton's _Mechanck's Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing_) than on grammatical construction, and multiply-nested parentheses to encourage the reader to envision several layers of signification. But then, my enthusiasm has ever been for the field of Informal Writing, as close to Conversation (albeit, perhaps, rather erudite conversation) as practical.

You don't mention that the new edition of the Shorter OED has dealt severely with hyphenated words, either combining them into one or dropping the hyphen in favor of an (en-quad?) space. I expect to continue (and even expand) my fanzine-based practice of Combining (as in "email", "neopro", & "hyperactive") even though the oldtime consideration of the costs of stencils, paper, and postage is no longer applicable. As long as there doesn't seem to be a pressing Need to change old habits (such as using two spaces following a period), I don't propose to do it.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm horrible when it comes to first draft writing (which is most of my online stuff).

I use too many commas, not enough periods, and forget to nest my semi-colons (though I do better with them than most).

I use (once getting praise for doing it "elegantly" at Obsidian Wings) ([{}]) and all sorts of things to try and keep my stream of thought as I thought it.

Which leads some people to abuse me. I was, just last week, called an illiterate, uneducated (IIRC) NITWIT [emphasis in the original, that much I do recall) because of it.

I too am prone to uppercase oddities, archaic usage. I have an odd mix of british, and american, spellings; because that is the way in which they look best, to me.

I am prone to emphatic sentence fragments and really short (if dense) paragraphs.

But, as is said in Communications Theory, "The meaning of the message is the message that's received" and I seem to do all right at the conveying content aspects of things.

So I think I can survive the brickbats of my detractors.

TK

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

There's much to be said in favor of first-draft writing -- when the only other choice is not writing anything (or putting it off until there's time to Do It Right, which usually amounts to never getting around to it, for me), which is the common situation.

I frequently thank the Shade of Miss Schroder (Hoover Highschool, in the '40s), who took the time to sit me down and have me write two three-paragraph essays -- one immediately upon being given the topic, one (on another topic) after thinking about it for five minutes (along the lines of the Outlining we'd covered in class). Even before she drew out The Dreaded Red Ink Pen, I could perceive that the second one was much /b/e/t/t/e/r/ less bad than the first.

Frequently -- even generally -- my second-draft is the opposite of an improvement, as I think of more possible bases to cover, more potential objections to subvert, and more extensive Byzantine complexities for sentences already over-long for the taste of many modern readers. By the third- or fourth- draft Total Re-write some cutting and genuine improvement might take place, but it's difficult to remember back to the last time that happened. And for years most of my writing was composed-on-stencil first-draft APAzine material, with a couple of minutes to think about what each paragraph was going to contain ... if I wasn't crowding the deadline _too_ closely. Mostly, however, I think it was adequate communication for the genre, and the milieu.

You've covered all the points that I can recall having caused me to bobble for a moment when reading your postings ("Easy writin's demmed hard read'n") but I've found them mostly trivial bobbles/glitches -- more like personality characteristics that are, on balance, more engaging than annoying. The only one that's caused me actual trouble (several times) has been the (excessive, IMHO) density or compression that sometimes leads to a need to request explication (or to await someone else doing so, or misunderstanding you). Not actually a Real Problem, but ....ummm... the Reader has an obligation to do _some_ work, yes, but the Writer who requires too much of this runs the risk of seeming to be a tad arrogant.

Human verbal communication -- especially written communication -- often seems to me to be subject to the same observation I sometimes apply to the Internet: "As with a dog walking on its hind legs, one doesn't expect it to be done well, one marvels that it is done at all". (That's adapted, of course, from Dr. Sam: Johnson's comment anent female preachers.)

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I am among those who are appalled that the most recent update includes chaise lounge.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

That's all I have to say, or rather, wail. :(

OED

[cliffjburns.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Terry:

I swear, with the next decent stipend that comes in from the movie stuff or anything else, I'm going to seriously look at getting a set of Oxford dictionaries. I saw a set for sale in the NEW YORKER for $895.00...I wonder how much I'd have to pay for a good used set. With the Canadian dollar now at parity with our Yank cousins, transactions like this look sweeter and sweeter. As a word guy, I would revere those Oxfords like the mummified body of Christ...

Have a good fall...klaatu barada nikto and all that...