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A line in the sand?

KeithD said:
Full circle for the thread now on "fingernails on chalk board" renderings. "O.K." isn't OK or okay. Given the two actual options for rendering this (OK or okay), I still frequently see it rendered incorrectly in two ways: O.K. or Ok (which aren't either OK or okay). OK?
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I did not know this, and I was skeptical about the correctness of your opinion. But I looked it up and you are right.

Now I've learned my thing for the day. I can rest easy that for the remainder of the day I'll just muddle through with the knowledge I have.
 
Write something.

If nobody shoots you dead for your writing, you got away with it.

And if you're dead, sayonara.
 
SimonDoom said:
I did not know this, and I was skeptical about the correctness of your opinion. But I looked it up and you are right.

Now I've learned my thing for the day. I can rest easy that for the remainder of the day I'll just muddle through with the knowledge I have.
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Well, except it wasn't my "opinion." I try to be sourced by an authority before weighing in on language use questions here. That means I'm usually not giving "my opinion."
 
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KeithD said:
Well, except it wasn't my "opinion." I try to be sourced by an authority before weighing on language use questions here. That means I'm usually not giving "my opinion."
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And your facts be correct -> OK | ˌōˈkā | (also okay | ˈōˈkā | ) informal

What type of writing would you say the "informal, okay" is intended for? Are our short stories here "informal writing"? I've been using that in my stories forever, thinking it was shining a bright light on my intelligence :rolleyes:
 
MelissaBaby said:
Would you have the same complaint if she had been googling or skypeing?
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Probably enough time has flowed under the bridge for general listeners (such as me) to understand the use of googling and skypeing as verbs - although skypeing, in particular, is rather ugly in written form. But FaceTime is not an application I had heard of before this discussion.

For many years I wrote columns for two magazines. Both magazines were published by the same publisher; both lots of my copy had to make it past the same subeditor. Bruce and I seldom disagreed on anything. But, just occasionally, he would remind me not to send the reader off for a dictionary. 'They may not return,' he said.
 
KeithD said:
Well, except it wasn't my "opinion." I try to be sourced by an authority before weighing in on language use questions here. That means I'm usually not giving "my opinion."
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I didn't know that at first. What you wrote did not sound right to me, and I was surprised to find I was wrong. I'm glad to know this. Now I have to go through my partially written stories and make sure I correct them before publication.
 
jehoram said:
The real test comes over time. I read a study that said that about 70% of the words that came into fashion in the first half of the twentieth century were no longer in use by the end of the century.
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That's not a bad survival rate, TBH. If I bought a car and the maker told me it had a 30% chance of lasting me 50+ years, I'd think they were having me on.

I can understand frustration at changes that obscure meaning. But I don't get the hostility to neologisms like "googling" that are easily understood and which help describe something that's become commonplace. Where is the harm? How are people supposed to talk about these things?

Back in 1948, Claude Shannon showed that if you want communication to be efficient, more commonly-used concepts require shorter words. Much of the evolution of language is driven by that principle. "Automobile" might have been fine back when it was a novelty, but we've saved billions of hours by compressing to "auto" and repurposing "car" (itself a compression of "carriage") and "bus" (from "omnibus").
 
ChloeTzang said:
Woo hooo, you got it. Lol. :D Now if the language doesn’t evolve..... FaceTiming is just one more new word, and English takes them from everywhere. Adaptability is the key word here.
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Extra points to Chloe for correct capitalization and no-spacing between the 2 words of 'FaceTime'.
 
ishtat said:
Noted. The incorrect information came from a radio report attributing the description to an un-named police source, which report had already been repeated, before being rectified. And as you noted, I corrected it immediately. But thank you for your opinion and judgement, it will be treated with all the respect due to it.
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Okay... so a week after a bunch of neo-Nazis held a demonstration in my city about the evils of "immigrants", some radio station chose to run a story about a rapist-murderer-immigrant, without taking even a few minutes to make sure they had their facts right? (Seriously, it took me about three minutes searching to find who the guy was and where he was from.)

Lovely, fantastic, not at all problematic. Would you mind saying what the radio station was, so I know never to trust them? I have no time for "journalists" who are more concerned with being first than being truthful or responsible.
 
KenNicottii said:
Extra points to Chloe for correct capitalization and no-spacing between the 2 words of 'FaceTime'.
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Alas, I couldn't work out what FaceTiming would be in Old English. It was fun tho, and when you look at an Old English dictionary, almost all the words are totally unrecognizable, and that's in only just over 1,000 years.

Eaw, se englisc a bret. Nanuht belifan se ylcan.

englisc is recognizable, and nanuht is similar enough to naught, altho naught has pretty much fallen out of use. I'd defy anyone but a linguist who knows Old English to recognize any of the other words. Look at Chaucer instead, halfway between Old English and us and almost unreadable.

Now think about the challenges faced when you start to study proto-nostratic, the ancestral language of most existent languages, dating back to the end of the last glacial period - 15,000-17,000 years ago. That just makes my head explode. :eek:
 
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ChloeTzang said:
Alas, I couldn't work out what FaceTiming would be in Old English. It was fun tho, and when you look at an Old English dictionary, almost all the words are totally unrecognizable, and that's in only just over 1,000 years.

Eaw, se englisc a bret. Nanuht belifan se ylcan.

englisc is recognizable, and nanuht is similar enough to naught, altho naught has pretty much fallen out of use. I'd defy anyone but a linguist who knows Old English to recognize any of the other words. Look at Chaucer instead, halfway between Old English and us and almost unreadable.

Now think about the challenges faced when you start to study proto-nostratic, the ancestral language of most existent languages, dating back to the end of the last glacial period - 15,000-17,000 years ago. That just makes my head explode. :eek:
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As well as the unrecognisable ones, there are also the false friends that come from linguistic evolution. Calling somebody "nice" in Old English was an insult, and if you give somebody a "gift" in Germany you'll get arrested for attempted murder.

This one blew my mind last year: discovering that "black", "blue", "bleach", "blonde", and "flamingo" all come from the same root word.
 
Bramblethorn said:
This one blew my mind last year: discovering that "black", "blue", "bleach", "blonde", and "flamingo" all come from the same root word.
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I love it. I have a couple of books on linguistics lying around, including one by Merrit Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. And a few more on the origins of the Indo-Europeans. It's a fascinating little side-interest that I read up on every now and then.
 
KeithD said:
A long time ago I drew a line in the sand on "impact" as a verb. That's been washed out by the tide ever since.
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According to Dictionary.com, impact has been both a none and a verb since somewhere around 1775. It is the transitive version which is recent:

Origin of impact

First recorded in 1775–85; (noun and v.) back formation from impacted

Related forms

non·im·pact , noun, adjective
post·im·pact , adjective

Usage note

The verb impact has developed the transitive sense “to have an impact or effect on” ( The structured reading program has done more to impact the elementary schools than any other single factor ) and the intransitive sense “to have an impact or effect” ( The work done at the computer center will impact on the economy of Illinois and the nation ). Although recent, the new uses are entirely standard and most likely to occur in formal speech and writing. See also impactful.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/impact
 
Bramblethorn said:
Okay... so a week after a bunch of neo-Nazis held a demonstration in my city about the evils of "immigrants", some radio station chose to run a story about a rapist-murderer-immigrant, without taking even a few minutes to make sure they had their facts right? (Seriously, it took me about three minutes searching to find who the guy was and where he was from.)

Lovely, fantastic, not at all problematic. Would you mind saying what the radio station was, so I know never to trust them? I have no time for "journalists" who are more concerned with being first than being truthful or responsible.
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Do they also use the term rapist-murderer-citizen?
 
someoneyouknow said:
According to Dictionary.com, impact has been both a none and a verb since somewhere around 1775. It is the transitive version which is recent:

Origin of impact

First recorded in 1775–85; (noun and v.) back formation from impacted

Related forms

non·im·pact , noun, adjective
post·im·pact , adjective

Usage note

The verb impact has developed the transitive sense “to have an impact or effect on” ( The structured reading program has done more to impact the elementary schools than any other single factor ) and the intransitive sense “to have an impact or effect” ( The work done at the computer center will impact on the economy of Illinois and the nation ). Although recent, the new uses are entirely standard and most likely to occur in formal speech and writing. See also impactful.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/impact
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Impact has been a verb to represent a car hitting a tree for a very long time, yes. As a verb to mean "have influence on," only by way of government supercilious attempts to sound erudite in purposely obfuscating reports. (I wrote the editor's handbook still (as far as I know) in use in the government's foreign news agency, and it still specifies "Use 'impact' as a verb only in terms of cars hitting trees.")

But, yes, I should have covered that at my first mention of it.
 
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ChloeTzang said:
I love it. I have a couple of books on linguistics lying around, including one by Merrit Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. And a few more on the origins of the Indo-Europeans. It's a fascinating little side-interest that I read up on every now and then.
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Cavalli-Sforza's "The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution" was another one that I read along with Ruhlen. The whole history of the evolution of language and tracing the expansion of modern humans out of Africa is really fascinating. And there's all sorts of spin-off books on different aspects of this.

The Solutrean hypothesis on the peopling of the Americas claims that the earliest human migration to the Americas took place from Europe, during the Last Glacial Maximum and that's a fascinating one too. "Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture" by Dennis Stanford
 
KeithD said:
Impact has been a verb to represent a car hitting a tree for a very long time, yes. As a verb to mean "have influence on," only by way of government supercilious attempts to sound erudite in purposely obfuscating reports. (I wrote the editor's handbook still (as far as I know) in use in the government's foreign news agency, and it still specifies "Use 'impact' as a verb only in terms of cars hitting trees.")

But, yes, I should have covered that at my first mention of it.
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Wasn't trying to be snarky, so no offense. I've always known impact to be both noun and verb and was confused at your normally informative comments.
 
someoneyouknow said:
Wasn't trying to be snarky, so no offense. I've always known impact to be both noun and verb and was confused at your normally informative comments.
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No, you were right that I was focused on just one usage of "impact" as a verb in my original posting.
 
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