Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

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I need an around the frae girl

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 13 April 2020 11:19 (five years ago)

Bamboo earrins

genital giant (Neanderthal), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:00 (five years ago)

based off of is good and correct

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 12:06 (five years ago)

im professional sub editor, i sub it in even if its not there

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 12:07 (five years ago)

With "off" being transitive I thought it didn't need "of," but I defer to you.

TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:09 (five years ago)

rhythmic necessity

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:11 (five years ago)

Based af.

coviderunt omnes (pomenitul), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:13 (five years ago)

deems is correct, english has no actual rules except what feels good, to me
— bob marley again

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 12:16 (five years ago)

Don't let dem fool ya

genital giant (Neanderthal), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:25 (five years ago)

Emancipate yourself off of mental slavery

- Bob Marley

Non, je ned raggette rien (onimo), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:36 (five years ago)

dreadful quotes

calzino, Monday, 13 April 2020 12:38 (five years ago)

lolz! xp

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, 13 April 2020 12:41 (five years ago)

Get into my dreams
Get off of my car

genital giant (Neanderthal), Monday, 13 April 2020 13:13 (five years ago)

Get Offa my Dike

Fleetwood Machiavelli (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 13 April 2020 13:36 (five years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWXnVOgzqvc

Fleetwood Machiavelli (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 13 April 2020 13:39 (five years ago)

based off of = based on?

weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, 13 April 2020 14:11 (five years ago)

"based off of" helps suggest that additional weird elements have crept in

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 14:40 (five years ago)

yep, analogous to copied off of = copied from (see also "got off on")

For some people "based off" is probably being parsed as a phrasal verb (and why wouldn't it, English famously has over ten thousand of them) so tacking a prepositional phrase at the end of it is perfectly natural. But if you insist the construction is "based + prepositional phrase" then "based off of" is not going to work for you.

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 14:54 (five years ago)

i am an accelerationist descriptivist who is also a professional sub-editor, its wild over here

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 15:02 (five years ago)

f hazel always making sense
trying to explain phrasal verbs to my students always leads to long faces -- there are SO many of them and the meaning of each one is not logical. we talked about "take ____" once and it actually reduced our morale :-/

weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:25 (five years ago)

phrasal verbs are probably the most annoying thing about the english language, so intuitively understood by native speakers, so impenetrable to everyone else. I think being aware of them when grading your speech might be the biggest eureka moment for a novice esl teacher.

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:29 (five years ago)

the list of phrases with 'take' is only surpassed in ridiculousness by the many uses of 'set'

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:30 (five years ago)

yeah you could probably take fifty common verbs and the fifty most common prepositions and make a matrix of phrasal verb definitions from them that would be baffling in its randomness

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:31 (five years ago)

a matrix out of

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:34 (five years ago)

thinking about phrasal verbs makes me equal parts frustrated and sad -- frustrated for myself as a teacher and sad for my students that i have to tell them "it's possible u will never learn this"

i do enjoy explaining the difference between a phrasal verb and a prepositional phrase though
that's doable

weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:34 (five years ago)

it always makes me smile when I think of my grandmother, who would routinely come down hard on us kids for the most trivial grammatical transgressions, but whose everyday speech was full of phrases like "don't take on so" and "get away with you"

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 15:36 (five years ago)

take up
take out
take in
take with
take to
take after
take on

each with its own quite different distinct meaning

Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:32 (five years ago)

the lovely Emma complained a lot about this iirc, see also every verb ever, i.e.

see to
see out
see around

etc

Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:33 (five years ago)

take back
take forward
take away

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:34 (five years ago)

take down

sure lookit

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:34 (five years ago)

German is just as exasperating in this regard, perhaps even more so.

coviderunt omnes (pomenitul), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:36 (five years ago)

i like it

mark s, Monday, 13 April 2020 16:38 (five years ago)

The interesting thing to me (not a linguist) is that it seems difficult to impossible to explain the meaning of “take” alone in many of those verbs. “Take with” you can gloss “take” as “bring” but in “take after”, how could you possibly gloss the “take” half by itself? “Take after” just means “resemble”

silby, Monday, 13 April 2020 16:47 (five years ago)

it is impossible as each phrasal verb with take + [x] has a discrete meaning. also each phrasal verb usually has a regular action verb that could take (hehehe) its place.

we talked about "take ____" once and it actually reduced our morale :-/ you can see how frustrating it is for learners

weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:50 (five years ago)

take after is to follow

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:53 (five years ago)

covers someone being alike in more than just resemblance, i suppose

"im awful with money, i take after my father that way"

kind of thing

ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Monday, 13 April 2020 16:54 (five years ago)

take after food

kinder, Monday, 13 April 2020 17:42 (five years ago)

It would be fascinating to somehow measure how much of one's speech a group of people/a class etc understand and how much is lost - through garbled syntax, use of inappropriate language (at both vocabulary and semantic level), simple zoning out. It'd have to be pretty high, right?

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:26 (five years ago)

Most people, most of the time, are depending on context to interact with others... if you've ever spent time doing transcription, you know that after the fact a conversation between 3-4 people is extremely difficult to parse.

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:37 (five years ago)

It's a wonder we ever manage to impart any useful information at all. My classroom is generally a bedlam of noise and miscommunication but the results are decent, so...

I go with neckbeard maestro William Empson: the language problem but we have to try.

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:44 (five years ago)

Language is the source of misunderstandings

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:53 (five years ago)

Interpretation is the source of misunderstandings

A is for (Aimless), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:56 (five years ago)

And everything we perceive is an interpretation.

A is for (Aimless), Monday, 13 April 2020 18:57 (five years ago)

the amount of info we can convey with language across even the noisiest channels should make you weep with joy each morning upon waking, it's probably one of the most amazing things in the entire universe. and all the various things people complain about are, for the most part, manifestations of an underlying playfulness that is essential to making language work as well as it does.

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:07 (five years ago)

otm

A is for (Aimless), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:09 (five years ago)

Unnecessary stains upon silence and nothingness iirc.

coviderunt omnes (pomenitul), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:09 (five years ago)

if humans didn't have language, and therefore expressive silence, then the universe could not ignore itself

avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:16 (five years ago)

It would ignore itself passively rather than actively. A more consummate ignorance.

coviderunt omnes (pomenitul), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:18 (five years ago)

dude

reality disliker (Left), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:18 (five years ago)

Cats have expressive silence, imo

jmm, Monday, 13 April 2020 19:19 (five years ago)


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