Pedants' Paradise

[jean]

Using...'quite unique' is a logical nonsense.

But quite has rather different meanings depending on whether the term it's used with is gradable or absolute.

If it's absolute, quite reinforces its absoluteness.

Compare quite pretty and quite beautiful.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But quite has rather different meanings depending on whether the term it's used with is gradable or absolute.
If it's absolute, quite reinforces its absoluteness.
Compare quite pretty and quite beautiful.

And, indeed, "quite dead" which used to feature in detective stories of the '40s & 50s.

A similar history to "merely" - once meaning "completely", ("things rank and gross in nature possess it merely") now "humbly".

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Have we had this one?


THE PEDANTS' REVOLT

[Serial_Apologist]

'Fraid so Alpie, can't remember when tho'

[Pabmusic]

And so this man returns home unexpectedly to find his wife in bed with another.

"Well", he says, "I am surprised!"

"No, dear", she responds, "I am surprised; you are astonished!"

[LeMartinPecheur]

Lynn Truss would no doubt enjoy the following from AOL News:
"But Apprentice finalist Luisa Zissman fell foul of the grammar police after deliberately deciding to junk the apostrophe from her company name and call it Bakers Toolkit. Some councils, too now omit apostrophe's in street signs such as St Paul's Square."

More isn't necessarily better!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

"But Apprentice finalist Luisa Zissman fell foul of the grammar police after deliberately deciding to junk the apostrophe from her company name and call it Bakers Toolkit.

Taking this point aside, I avoid any shop/business that is deliberately careless. I never go in either Morrisons or Currys and I avoided Woolworths after they stopped being "F.W.Woolworth".

[Don Petter]

Taking this point aside, I avoid any shop/business that is deliberately careless. I never go in either Morrisons or Currys and I avoided Woolworths after they stopped being "F.W.Woolworth".

And you'll be sorry to hear that 'Nothing over sixpence' didn't last.

[french frank]

Taking this point aside, I avoid any shop/business that is deliberately careless. I never go in either Morrisons or Currys and I avoided Woolworths after they stopped being "F.W.Woolworth".

This seems a very grey area to me. If there were a Mr Morrison who owned a shop it might be Morrison's [shop], but once Mr Morrison passes on and the company becomes some sort of group - or indeed 'company' - the 's' can be thought of as a plural rather than a possessive. Not sure why some people say Tescos (or are they saying Tescoes, Tesco's or Tescos'?).

And as I've said before, probably on this very thread, is FoR3 a listeners' group or a listeners group? Straightforward to me - the listeners don't own the group, so it's not a possessive use but a descriptive one (not whose group but what kind of group).

Vinteuil, of course, always speaks of Woolworth. Or he would if he deigned to mention them/it.

[vinteuil]

The OED is rapidly going the way of Radio 3.
It tries to justify all sorts to justify the speech and writing of those who couldn't be bothered to listen when they were as school. 10 years ago Kevin Keegan achieved notoriety for his use of the word "literally".Suddenly, the OED RogerWrighted the meaning of the word, leaving those who understood its meaning as the outsiders and those who had been misusing the Language as the friends of CB-H et al.

... as far as our old friend "literally" is concerned - I have just been re-reading David Bellos's "Is That a Fish in Your Ear?", where he points out that 'studies of large corpora of recorded speech have shown that the majority of the uses of 'literal' and 'literally' in English are figurative; similar results would no doubt be extracted from written texts in all European languages.'

Bellos has interesting things to say about what "literally" might originally have meant, at a time of oral culture when certain 'rare things were worthy of being 'put into letters', of being written down.'

Serious students will wish to refer to : Michael Israel, 'The Rhetoric of "Literal Meaning"', in Sean Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, The Literal and Non-Literal in Language and Thought, Frankurt: Lang, 2005, pp. 147-238.

[jean]

The OED...tries to justify all sorts to justify the speech and writing of those who couldn't be bothered to listen when they were as school...

Dictionaries are not in the business of justifying anything. They merely record.

[french frank]

Dictionaries are not in the business of justifying anything. They merely record.

In the following post I copied out what the dictionary says of itself:

"The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as ‘incorrect’."

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Dictionaries are not in the business of justifying anything. They merely record.

If that's so, their existence is rather pointless.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If that's so, their existence is rather pointless.

Not really, Alpie - unless one agrees with Henry Ford's idea of history. The OED is a record of the usage (including changes in spelling and pronunciation) of English vocabulary; so we can trace the changes in meaning of a word like "naughty". In Shakespeare's time, a contemptuous deliberate insult (telling someone that they are nothing, valueless) - nowadays something that gives pleasure, or an affectionate half-reprimand. The OED illustrates the history of such changes, taking this history up to current usages.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If there were a Mr Morrison who owned a shop it might be Morrison's [shop], but once Mr Morrison passes on and the company becomes some sort of group - or indeed 'company' - the 's' can be thought of as a plural rather than a possessive.

Ken Morrison is alive and kicking, so there is a Mr Morrison who owns a shop. When he passes on, he will be dead, so to assume it as "plural" would surely be a step in the wrong direction. Re the Tesco's/Tescos'/Tescoes quote, in some recent advertising by that company, they were comparing themselves with "Morrisons's, Asda's and Sainsbury's". They managed to get one of them right.