"Of" and "have"

[Ayailla]

If this thread is descending into general linguistic bugbears, may I present something that I have seen a lot in American TV that bugs the crap out of me.

"The problem is is that..."

The double is. People emphasise the first one, "The problem IS" and then feel the need to repeat it. I don't understand why people do it, but I have seen it a lot. "The problem IS is that..."

It drives me up the wall!

[RivkahChaya]

OK. I'm up for it, 'cause I got a lot of 'em.

Can I start with "relatable"? This is not a word. People use it to mean "A story line, or character in a story, to which a person can easily relate, or with which people can identify.

For one thing, the stem is wrong. Relate just shouldn't take -able. For another, "to relate" is an intransitive verb, and verbs that take -able are transitive. I have heard people use "relate" in the sense of "tell" without a preposition, but I don't think that's technically correct, and at any rate, that's not the meaning that people are going for when they talk about a character in a movie being "relatable."

Finally, there are plenty of words that mean what the speaker wants the non-word "relatable" to mean, but some people are to lazy to go look up a real word, or converse with people who might know things, or read books that do something besides reinforce their present limited experience, so they don't learn any new words once they stop watching Sesame Street, and just slice and dice old ones to come up with monstrosities like "relatable."

Try telling someone unfamiliar with the word, that something is "apposite." The fact that they may not know the word isn't bad, but the fact that because it sounds like "opposite," they may insist it must mean something similar, and you can't tell them any different, even if you look it up, is bad. It's how Senators don't get re-elected, and mayoral aides get fired, because people don't know what the word "*****rdly" means, even after you show them a dictionary, and the place in The Canterbury Tales where Chaucer uses it.

There was a funny TV commercial in the US, that was really great until the last line, and I guess enough people emailed the company, because it got pulled. It was a commercial for a credit card company, and how the owners of a huge Newfoundland used the reward points on their card to pay for his food (they're shown buying five bags of dog food at once), and many of the other large things he needs. It's very funny-- they paid for the gas when they drove out to get him when he was a tiny puppy, when they should have had a clue, because we see his mother in the background.

Then the commercial in the very end mentions something about the "enormity" of the situation. Oops.

[johns]

Some interesting stuff here. Thanks.

My own personal explanation is the same as a Phil H... People write what they hear meaning some folks use "of" because "could've" sounds like "could of" rather than "could have".

I'm off now to of myself a beer or 2.

[Mayerling]

My father was a linguist, so I picked up some points from him. One that I have never been able to shake, but which I have given up on was the word, "route", as in the travel passageway used by a pedestrian or driver to get from point "A" to point "B". It is also used to describe portions of a highway syster, and the famous "Route 66" which is a long highway out in the western portion of the U.S. (and subsequently a show about two young guys driving along it, and the people they meet in the towns along the way).

The problem is that it is constantly pronounced as "rout" in this country, even by educated people. As my father (who hated this confusion) would have said, "A "rout" is a defeat, in military or non-military but somewhat serious circumstances, a total defeat." "Route", which is a word from the French, is pronounced like the homenym "root" meaning the underlying portion of a planted vegetable in the ground, through which the vegetable gets it's nourishment. It is also the under portion of a tooth, so that when the tooth is weakened and rotten we require "root canal".

There is no problem to Americans to pronouncing "root" correctly, as it rhymes with "toot" or "boot" but it also does not really rhyme with "soot", which softens the "oo" combination to come out like "suht". Interestingly, Americans have no problem with "suit", meaning a man or woman's dress clothes usually for desk jobs or formal occasions. That does rhyme with "root" or (as originally pronounced) "route". Americans have yet to start confusing "suit" with "suite", a set of rooms in an apartment house, co-op, condominium, motel, or hotel. But give them time. "Suite" may also eventually get confused by my countrymen with "sweet" which sounds the same but relates to a pleasant flavor in items like cookies or ice cream or pie.

I too try to stick to the proper pronounciation of "route", but when I was in college I found many friends and intelligent people pronouncing it "rout". When I tried to correct this, they would say "Same difference". So much for pronunciation in the educated classes. Today I just grit my teeth quietly and accept "rout" as the pronunciation favored here. It has even gotten into our dictionaries.

Jeff

[Robert]

Jeff, they do sing "Route 66" over there, don't they, and not "Rout 66"?

[Simon Wood]

Hi All,

One of my most hated manglings of the English language is "I bought it off him" instead of "I bought it from him."

Regards,

Simon

[Smoking Joe]

I am certainly not a snob. Therefore I would not go round correcting,or complaining to friends or acquaintances about their use of The English language,as regards Could have-could of- could've etc.Life is much too short for that. What DOES annoy me however is a person who cant speak a sentence without including 3-4 F or C words within it.I recently heard this as I passed by 2 teenage girls as I came out of a shop.One of them spoke this memorable sentence to the other " That F*** pig Cu** Faced a*****e gonna get F****d good "..Charming!True she got her message across ,but my only thought was that the next time she opened her mouth,it would be nice if someone would put their fist in it!

[RivkahChaya]

I don't care about private conversations, or whether people want to write catfud on their shopping lists (Gary Larson reference). However, when people are trying to communicate with what they know will be a large audience, or an unknown audience, they really need to do their best to stick to a standard. One of the reasons legal contracts sometimes use language that seems odd, and are usually verbose, is to avoid ambiguity.

For a long time, laws still were written in Latin for the very reason that the language didn't evolve, and you did not get ambiguities because the meaning of a word changed. However, the need for non-lawyers to have access to legal texts prevailed.

My mother is a linguist, specifically, a dialectologist. She can really do that "You grew up in X, but your mother is from Y," by the way you speak, like Henry Higgins. It's uncanny. She can also understand anyone, no matter what their accent, even people who lived all their lives in Kyrghyzistan, and learned English from a scratched record.

[Smoking Joe]

Hi Riva
Your Mother sounds amazing.Part learned and part natural gift?

[Robert]

Is it my imagination, or has the arrival of online news accompanied a decline in standards even on the part of established news sources? Look at the spelling of 'defuse' :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/golf/22610823

[Phil H]

Does defuse mean?:

a) to take the explosive trigger from = de-fuze; or

b) to scatter or diffuse?

Anyone else shivver at a split infinitive? - I know they are not grammatically incorrect in the colonies.

Phil

[johns]

I am certainly not a snob. Therefore I would not go round correcting,or complaining to friends or acquaintances about their use of The English language,as regards Could have-could of- could've etc.Life is much too short for that. What DOES annoy me however is a person who cant speak a sentence without including 3-4 F or C words within it.I recently heard this as I passed by 2 teenage girls as I came out of a shop.One of them spoke this memorable sentence to the other " That F*** pig Cu** Faced a*****e gonna get F****d good "..Charming!True she got her message across ,but my only thought was that the next time she opened her mouth,it would be nice if someone would put their fist in it!

There was a lorry driver at a place I worked many years ago. He swore that much it was beyond belief. Even when talking in a normal and calm voice the swear words outnumbered regular words.

We had a nickname for him... of course.... We called him F**k C**t S**t B**ls

[Smoking Joe]

There was a lorry driver at a place I worked many years ago. He swore that much it was beyond belief. Even when talking in a normal and calm voice the swear words outnumbered regular words.

We had a nickname for him... of course.... We called him F**k C**t S**t B**ls

It might not be grammatically correct, might not even be spelt correctly,but I guess he got the message anyhow.

[Wickerman]

Irregardless, is one word that always makes me laugh when I hear it.

Oh, and I forgot, my mother always used to ask, "do you depress the clutch, or press the clutch?"

[Mayerling]

Jeff, they do sing "Route 66" over there, don't they, and not "Rout 66"?

Hi Robert,

Yes they do sing "Route 66" not "Rout 66", but the song was popularized (by Nat King Cole among others) in the 1950s. It has been since the 1960s that "rout" has become the pronunciation form for "route".

Jeff