Criterion is singular; criteria is plural

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Why do so many people get this wrong? Should we just accept it? It drives me crazy but it's so widespread I wonder if maybe we should just accept that the word 'criterion' is disappearing.

― moley, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:01 (eighteen years ago)

yeah, and what about "data"? when's the last time somebody asked you for a piece of datum?

― Edward III, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:22 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.criterionco.com/images/logotype_vert.gif

― Edward III, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:23 (eighteen years ago)

a piece of 'data' is grammatically correct, for it is a single piece of many different data. this word is practically never used incorrectly, i'm afraid.

― unfished business, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:33 (eighteen years ago)

A DATA POINT

― get bent, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:35 (eighteen years ago)

SIMULACRUM, SIMULACRA

― get bent, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:35 (eighteen years ago)

a data point = a point ascertained by viewing (more than one) data.

― unfished business, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:39 (eighteen years ago)

LJ, you are quite a piece of posters!

― nabisco, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:43 (eighteen years ago)

one of many

― unfished business, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 06:50 (eighteen years ago)

this word is practically never used incorrectly, i'm afraid.

Almost everyone nowadays would say "This data shows that...", instead of "These data show that...". If you still think of 'datum' as a countable noun with 'data' as the plural, then you would have to say that most people use the word wrongly. But most people think of data as an uncountable noun without a plural or a singular.

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 08:10 (eighteen years ago)

In other words, if you think the correct way is to say 'a datum, two data, three data...' (same as 'a poster, two posters...') then it's obviously wrong to say 'a piece of data' (or 'a piece of posters'). But if you think of data as uncountable, like 'furniture' (where you can't say 'one furniture, two furnitures...', you have to say 'some furniture' or 'a piece / two pieces of furniture'), then it's OK to say 'a piece of data'.

Nobody actually thinks that 'data' is the singular form - nobody says 'a data'.

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 08:21 (eighteen years ago)

i speak english, not latin.

― abanana, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 08:45 (eighteen years ago)

data is one of those nouns, like 'copiae' in latin, or 'means' in english, where the plural is the only version used. as with 'furniture', it is very much OK to use 'a piece of data' IMO.

― unfished business, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 09:02 (eighteen years ago)

data is one of those nouns....where the plural is the only version used

No, it's not. In most people's eyes there is no plural, as it's an uncountable noun. You can't use the construction 'a piece of + [plural of countable noun]', it sounds ridiculous: ; 'a piece of children' , 'a piece of socks', etc. But with uncountable nouns you either 'some ___' ('some wine', 'some rice', 'some chocolate', 'some data') or the construction 'a ____ of ______' ('a bottle of wine', 'a grain of rice', 'a bar of chocolate', 'a piece of data').

There are people who still use 'datum' as the singular and 'data' as the plural, but these are the same kind of people that say 'pianoforte'.

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 10:37 (eighteen years ago)

I always thought this was the same with scampi. Apparently, though, the singular of scampi is "scampo". Weird.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 10:41 (eighteen years ago)

me to thread

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 11:00 (eighteen years ago)

Criterion is singular; criteria is plural

criteria are plural, shirley?

ooh i'm gaggin' for a panini though (hi mark)

― CarsmileSteve, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:08 (eighteen years ago)

like a red flag to a bull..

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:11 (eighteen years ago)

Joffe lifts a finger, and a scampi darts about

and the BBC wouldn't get that wrong, not in the 'perfect english' early eventies broadcasting days, would they?

― Mark G, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:11 (eighteen years ago)

Suck my dicks, Steve :)

― Mark C, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:11 (eighteen years ago)

i actually say "criterion" all the time, and i enjoy seeing people's faces as they react to it. it usually goes 1) what the hell did he just say 2) is he some kind of knob 3) oh actually i understand what that means, i know that word 4) i will defer knob-judgment til later cause now i haven't been listening to what he's talking about and i'd better concentrate. in the meantime i have taken their wallet.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:13 (eighteen years ago)

hold on, didn't joffe haf a whole handful of scampi though? one on each finger?

― CarsmileSteve, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:21 (eighteen years ago)

Such mistakes are usually the result of the influence of the medium.

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:26 (eighteen years ago)

I think we've had this conversation wrt biscotti.

― teeny, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:26 (eighteen years ago)

phenomenon, singular
phenomena, plural

― elmo argonaut, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:28 (eighteen years ago)

I think we've had this conversation wrt biscotti.

"I'd like a biscotti" totally grates on my ears and I don't even speak Italian. Why don't you just order a double expresso with that and while you're at it stab me in the face.

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:31 (eighteen years ago)

appendix --> appendices
cervix --> cervices
index --> indices
matrix --> matrices
vortex --> vortices

― elmo argonaut, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:35 (eighteen years ago)

Spandex

― Mark G, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:38 (eighteen years ago)

Criterion/criteria actually drives me crazy, I have to correct people all the time at work (I don't do it to be an asshole, just so it doesn't get published with wrong usage).

― Jordan, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:42 (eighteen years ago)

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/channels/05/03/43a6edb9-00165-0607b-400cb8e1
"Tell you what -- how bout I give you 25 cent for one fettucino"

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:45 (eighteen years ago)

fettucinus

― Jordan, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:46 (eighteen years ago)

I haven't really noticed people saying 'a phenomena' or 'a criteria'. Is it just an American problem or do I live in a bubble?

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:52 (eighteen years ago)

Maybe you don't hang around people who are idiots.

― kenan, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:53 (eighteen years ago)

That can really skew your worldview.

― kenan, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 15:53 (eighteen years ago)

I can't think of Joffe without thinking of tortoise heads. Pfffffftttt....

Ahem. [link This from epicurious...]http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/how_to/food_dictionary/entry?id=4445[\link]

I'm right, and the entire early seventies BBC (see Life on Mars thread) is wrong. Yay me.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:12 (eighteen years ago)

I can't, however, post links.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:13 (eighteen years ago)

lol @ chris rock fettucino

― and what, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:13 (eighteen years ago)

s/be /link there.

― Mark G, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:15 (eighteen years ago)

Ah. Was wondering. And I do unix, too. Shame on me, and thankyou Mark.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:21 (eighteen years ago)

'A phenomena' cropped up in a lyric once when I was producing a singer. I had the damn singer change her damn lyric. I can put up with all kinds of bad behaviour in the studio, but poor grammar is unacceptable.

― moley, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 22:32 (eighteen years ago)

what's the plural of "morbius"?

― ghost rider, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 22:33 (eighteen years ago)

Die and Dice

I have no given up on this distinction and tell my students to Roll a Dice so as to avoid the weary conflict.

― Slumpman, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 22:40 (eighteen years ago)

blah!

― Dr Morbius Schefter, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 22:43 (eighteen years ago)

Podium+one or more=Podia

― Abbott, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 23:59 (eighteen years ago)

'Less' when the correct word is 'fewer' - eg, 'There are less people posting on ILX these days'. That one is pretty widespread.

― moley, Thursday, 8 March 2007 00:49 (eighteen years ago)

The less/fewer distinction is a circa C18 wank distinction, like so many other things. Still, I follow it, to my shame and weakness.

― Alba, Thursday, 8 March 2007 01:06 (eighteen years ago)

Latin and Greek plurals are arguably much more wanky than the less/fewer distinction. I'd feel a bit strange asking a university department what "focii" they offered with a major, for example. I also don't think I could order "two cappuccini" with a straight face - so it's all sort of arbitrary.

― Hurting 2, Thursday, 8 March 2007 01:53 (eighteen years ago)

what's the plural of "morbius"?

morbi

― Edward III, Thursday, 8 March 2007 01:55 (eighteen years ago)

morbia

― Curt1s Stephens, Thursday, 8 March 2007 01:57 (eighteen years ago)

The Doctors Morbid

― remy bean, Thursday, 8 March 2007 02:00 (eighteen years ago)

Skipping 74 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

... because a left-field quip is neither snotty nor bitchy, right?

― elmo argonaut, Friday, 9 March 2007 16:10 (eighteen years ago)

snap! guilty as all fuckout of course, but i was merely pointing it out rather than aiming it at one person.

― darraghmac, Friday, 9 March 2007 16:25 (eighteen years ago)

just a bit of fun

― elmo argonaut, Friday, 9 March 2007 16:26 (eighteen years ago)

how do japanese people pronounce the english version of karaoke though?

― darraghmac, Friday, 9 March 2007 16:28 (eighteen years ago)

I hate hate hate the fact that there's no 'English Comittee' like there is a French one.
The language is getting less and less phonetic, less and less grammatically logical...
Inglish Kuhmitee!

Let it go, dude. The 'language' isn't getting less phonetic (how can it? that doesn't mean anything), but the way we pronounce things is slowly diverging further and further from the way we did when the spellings were first laid out hundreds of years ago. That's just the way it goes: languages evolve over time. Nothing is fixed. You can't form a committee to freeze language in time. Grammar isn't necessarily logical either - English isn't the same as Mathematics.

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Friday, 9 March 2007 17:10 (eighteen years ago)

http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media2006/images/spbee2006.jpg

― elmo argonaut, Friday, 9 March 2007 17:52 (eighteen years ago)

You can't form a committee to freeze language in time

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/1871c/1871ca40.jpg

― C0L1N B..., Friday, 9 March 2007 18:02 (eighteen years ago)

I think this "schwa plus yod" combination Elmo mentions tends to come out as "ee," because we're not used to using the yod with short vowels.

― jaymc, Friday, 9 March 2007 18:16 (eighteen years ago)

I think I will pronounce the word "croaky" from now on to add that descriptive connotation.

― elmo argonaut, Friday, 9 March 2007 18:30 (eighteen years ago)

"That's just the way it goes: languages evolve over time. Nothing is fixed."
Why are you in this thread?

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:16 (eighteen years ago)

y r u n dis tred?

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:22 (eighteen years ago)

We'd need a new letter for 'th' too.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:25 (eighteen years ago)

I think words are more worth fighting over when you preserve some shade of their meaning by preserving the "proper" usage or form. Knowing the media/medium thing actually sharpens the way one thinks about media, for example.

― Hurting 2, Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:41 (eighteen years ago)

..and that's only true for dead languages?

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:49 (eighteen years ago)

I really have no idea where you're coming from, Windy. Maybe I DON'T get it. Maybe you should state your argument instead of asking people why they are contributing to this thread (how dare they!).

― elmo argonaut, Saturday, 10 March 2007 01:11 (eighteen years ago)

My point is this:
Why do people care about the correct conjugation and pronounciation(I didn't being that up) of dead languages, but regularly mispronounce, misuse, and improperly conjugate words from languages in use?
That's what I said the first time, and several times since. The responce seems to be "Language changes, and English sounds better when you fuck up."
My responce(Why are you here, then?) is asking if they think that, why are they in here arguing the opposite for dead languages?
Why do people care about dead languages more than living?

Every time I hear someone invent a plural for a Japanese noun I twitch. (grammatical enough for you folks?)
Again, people care about conjugating dead languages and using them to develope new terms(but still use old grammar), but when using living languages, it seems(who knows the mind of another?) that they can't be arsed to learn how to conjugate word used every day in a living language...

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 01:30 (eighteen years ago)

Please excuse my reduncancy in that fucked-up sentence.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 01:38 (eighteen years ago)

Thank you, that's actually a really good question that I don't have an answer for at the moment. I'll think about that for a while. Hm.

― elmo argonaut, Saturday, 10 March 2007 01:42 (eighteen years ago)

Hmm indeed.

As little as I know about Japanese, I would certainly never say "Samurais," let alone (god forbid) "Sushis." But you could probably come up with an example of a Japanese pluralization mistake I would make. I think the answer probably lies in academia and the prevalence for many years of Latin and Greek in European and American universities - they were seen as foundational whereas Japanese would have been a specialty. Also (due in part to that) we obviously owe much much more of our language to Latin and Greek than to Japanese, so there's a lot more awareness and even intuitive understanding of grammatical rules from those languages.

― Hurting 2, Saturday, 10 March 2007 01:51 (eighteen years ago)

Good points.
I think that's more of an understanding issue than a caring... I dunno.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 02:08 (eighteen years ago)

Prescriptivism regarding language is really descriptivism regarding economic and social class structures.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:01 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, per Hurting, the difference is that new borrowings are usually random loan words, whereas a lot of the dead-language stuff isn't about "loans," it's about the basis of a whole segment of our language. And since parts of English grammar and usage were standardized -- artificially or not* -- around Latin and Greek classical education, messing those up actually chips away at the logical structure of the whole thing.

(* = I don't entirely buy it when people say "that rule doesn't matter, it's just an 18th-century fake-Latin thing," cuz ... well, some dudes put some worthwhile work into helping standardize the language, and they made a fairly conscious decision to work with Latin as a model, rather than Germanic stuff. Artificial in imposed via class power, sure, but the overall point was still to help make the language more consistent and systematized, which is a nice thing. And most of the decisions they made that actually harmed the consistency and flexibility of the language in the service of fake-Latin have already long died off.)

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:20 (eighteen years ago)

Admittedly, there is no way to make a truly logical and consistant language(even 10 pages of Wittgenstein will tell you that), but I think we could at least try to have consistancy and rules.

Communication is important, and standardizing language simplifies that.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:28 (eighteen years ago)

Since I don't know a lick of Japanese and since I don't want to offend those who do, I have decided not only no longer to incorrectly pronounce and pluralize terms of Japanese origin, but I shall cease using them altogether. Thus, instead of "karaoke", I shall say, "an easy excuse to embarass yrself when drunk". Instead of "sushi", I shall say, "overpriced fish on white rice with seaweed". And instead of "anime", I shall say, "cartoons with balloon-eyed girlies that undersocialized boys like to masturbate at". Then nobody will be offended.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:30 (eighteen years ago)

Haha also it's pretty difficult to think of a way for a widespread, coherent language to develop that's not based on SOME form of power.

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:32 (eighteen years ago)

Exactly.
Examples, Irish developed under several forms of leadership within the country itself, then with the invasion and takeover by the british there was no teaching or standardization. The result is some severly different dialects.
Save the invasion there are similar issues with Japanese. The dialects are so different that some Japanese people can't understand each other. Touhoku(I may have misspelled that) dialect is different enough that the research of it is a TV series in Japan.

Some films made in Scottland(entirely in English) are subtitled for their American release due to the sever dialect differences.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:39 (eighteen years ago)

I'm not totally against a prescriptive theory of language, but it's a lot more useful when such a philosophy is used to facilitate communication than when it's used to nerdily denounce those who don't follow THE RULEZ.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:41 (eighteen years ago)

Those 'RULEZ' are what keeps the communication working.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:43 (eighteen years ago)

The rules are admittedly poor description of the past use of language. Natural languages, as opposed to machine languages, are not developed top-down, with a BNF description of the grammar. No, natural languages develop according to rules far more complex than those of mere syntax. The fact that we can apply some very ill-formed "rules" to natural languages is more a testament to human imagination than it is to the objects of the rules themselves.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:49 (eighteen years ago)

I understand your point on a philosophical level. However, if we have no rules at all then communication becomes a near impossible task.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 03:56 (eighteen years ago)

Three questions any true rule-prescriptivist must answer to be taken seriously:

1. If natural languages have "rules", then WHO is responsible for creating and maintaining said rules? A government? A self-anointed group of high-minded nerds? The ubermensch?
2. If natural languages have "rules", then what, precisely, ARE these rules? A search for a very small subset of the "rules" darn near killed Gnome Chompsky. Stating natural language rules in a precise fashion turns out to be impossibly difficult, and nearly any off-the-cuff contender can be shot down faster'n a helium-filled piggie.
3. If natural languages have rules, then WHEN were these rules set? Was it some pre-linguistic era? Or do the rules change over time. And if they do change over time, how to we access the currently valid set of rules?

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 04:01 (eighteen years ago)

Lib I think at any given moment that's true for like 99% of a language, but:

(a) there's inevitably some high-level fine-tuning point where a bit of top-down guidance eases the way, like the fact that the term "natural language" was hashed out by a linguist elite before coming to you and I, and both the hashing-out and the coming-to-us part were dependent on people having to say "wait, you're misuing that term"; plus

(b) our language has reached a potential for complexity and precision that depends in part on people sitting down and learning it; it's a tool we can do amazing things with just with natural language acquisition and interaction, but there's this extra level of really super-incredible stuff that requires studying how to use the tool right. (Like how you can build a house just about any way you like, but putting up a skyscraper will take a little coordination and planning.)

I don't think people who say prescriptive stuff have some kind of gripe with the natural evolution of language, and I'm not sure why it's imagined that they do. Apart from flat-out pedants and sticklers, I think people usually stick up for rules when they genuinely believe the rule makes the language better (more precise, more expressive, etc.) and would hate to see a good distinction fall by the wayside. (Especially when the people they're arguing with aren't claiming the alternative is more expressive or richly idiomatic or anything, but just saying "whatever, I don't feel like learning another rule.")

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 04:07 (eighteen years ago)

xpost Libcrypt I have no idea what kind of straw "prescriptivist" you're talking about here -- you're doing that thing where people pretend there are Evil Prescriptivists out there who think language has a divine eternal state. Nobody like that exists. The evilest "prescriptivists" get is, like, noting that "irregardless" is non-standard in the dictionary.

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 04:11 (eighteen years ago)

In fact the only existence of prescription in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE is in dictionaries, usage books, style guides, all of which exist because people turn to them for prescriptive advice! (A guy writing a resume who looks something up in the dictionary is not looking to learn that the way he'd normally say it is just fine -- he wants to know what a reasonable, well-informed advisor would suggest is best.)

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 04:15 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco: I've certainly met quite a few rule-prescriptivists in my time: The fallacy of these folks is in attributing some kind of simple, absolute recursive authority to their own rule-sources, a notion that cannot withstand even a half-hearted examination. Hardly a straw man, few rule-prescriptivists I've known are willing to allow for a more pragmatic, descriptivo-prescriptivism, whereby natural language rules aren't transmitted, inviolate, from generation to generation, but instead take on a kind of social validity that, in my opinion, largely derives from class. In particular, few armchair rule-prescriptivists are willing to say that THEY can change the rules (to a certain degree) without necessarily destroying their validity. For, to do so undermines the unspoken apparatus of legitimacy they use to denounce those who happen to follow DIFFERENT, but perhaps equally valid, rules. Once it's allowed that the sources of validity of a linguistic rule are mere humans, then our democratic instincts chafe at proclaiming some folks more authoritiative than others, while the notion of multiple, valid rulesets is distasteful, if not seemingly contradictory.

In short, those who use prescriptivism to denounce dialects distinct from their own, which are nevertheless rule-bound entities -- and believe me, there are millions of folks who love to play this game -- fail to appreciate the sources of legitimacy of their own dialects and the true reasons for the existence of rules.

To say that no rule-prescriptivists exist is somewhat short-sighted, considering how much fun grammar nazis have on this very board. Corner yr fave grammar nazi at a party when he's had one or two and ask him whether he has the power to create legitimate rules for his fave natural language. I'll betcha he'll say "no".

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 04:56 (eighteen years ago)

"1. If natural languages have "rules", then WHO is responsible for creating and maintaining said rules? A government? A self-anointed group of high-minded nerds? The ubermensch?
2. If natural languages have "rules", then what, precisely, ARE these rules? A search for a very small subset of the "rules" darn near killed Gnome Chompsky. Stating natural language rules in a precise fashion turns out to be impossibly difficult, and nearly any off-the-cuff contender can be shot down faster'n a helium-filled piggie.
3. If natural languages have rules, then WHEN were these rules set? Was it some pre-linguistic era? Or do the rules change over time. And if they do change over time, how to we access the currently valid set of rules?"
I've read Wittgenstein.

Pragmatism, dude.
"FUCK YOUUU!! I WANNA USE WERDS HOW I WANNA!" is how this is sounding. I realise that's not what you're saying, but the fact that you seem to refuse to accept that people need rules to communicate is baffling, and that explaination is the closest thing to logical I can figure out *shrug*
Things like this approach moral relativism in their annoyance and complicated nature.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:01 (eighteen years ago)

I realise that's not what you're saying, but the fact that you seem to refuse to accept that people need rules to communicate is baffling

People don't need rules. Rules need people.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:09 (eighteen years ago)

I've read Wittgenstein.

So you keep reminding us. Nobody takes the Tractatus seriously anymore, dude. Hell, nobody took it seriously then except perhaps for Ayer.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:13 (eighteen years ago)

Wow.
I guess it's OK for me to kill people I don't like, take things without paying, and tell you to fuck off for being annoying.
Nope.

You're wrong. It's OK to be wrong.

Funny thing: you're using linguistic logic to make your arguments. Without linguistic rules your arguments are literally meaningless.

But since we don't need linguistic rules:
FrusreameSAas saaIasdnnngoee. ASaudnopw38naa.vaaaw2-=0p=003=sask. IAAnnaa0wauwjadkhw98n20ff;'
a822-1n aao0--0u2-0jx^23akujn0022j203aAA==-!deklaasjuvvpb]aopas!

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:14 (eighteen years ago)

"So you keep reminding us. Nobody takes the Tractatus seriously anymore, dude. Hell, nobody took it seriously then except perhaps for Ayer. "
have you read Philisophical Investigations? Because that's what's relevant here.

How far are you into your philosophy class? Because you seem to think you know things, and an important thing to know when studying philosphy is YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL.
Anyone who studies philosophy and doesn't realise that never learns anything of value from it.

have you read more than me? Yeah. But you seem to think you know shit.
Yeah. You Know Shit. Same as the rest of us.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:18 (eighteen years ago)

linguistic philosophy died in the 50s dude

― abanana, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:19 (eighteen years ago)

Are you sure it's autism you have and not tourette's?

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:21 (eighteen years ago)

"linguistic philosophy died in the 50s dude"
Thinking about words is bad?
Saying words don't affect thought is insane.
A little study of foreign language and culture will show that. The fact that ideas don't exist in another cultures where words for it don't exist. Human interaction at the least is hugely affected by how language works.

Philosophy is not something that should be treated like hula hoops. Thinking shouldn't go out of style.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:25 (eighteen years ago)

"Are you sure it's autism you have and not tourette's?"
What's the world look like through a glass bellybutton?

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:26 (eighteen years ago)

Arggh Libcrypt I think we basically agree here about language, but you're attributing totally ridiculous motives to people. When people are grammar Nazis on this board, they're not making claims about their divine prescriptive authority, they're either just having fun correcting people or suggesting rules they think are valuable ones. I mean, sorry if you've met some rigid weirdos in your time, but when normal people make corrections that's all they're doing, and it's silly to pretend much else.

P.S. the best source of linguistic authority these days -- the kind people are looking for when they open usage books -- is the same best source for authority for most information: some sense of expertise and good judgment. E.g., you trust that the dictionary can tell you the best way to spell something because they have expert panels and research and hopefully some reputation for being sensible in the past, and you trust that they've thought about it for a lot longer than you personally care to.

― nabisco, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:34 (eighteen years ago)

ok then, to be verbose, the "linguistic turn" of philosophy is dead

using wittgenstein to attack descriptivism is still nutty

― abanana, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:40 (eighteen years ago)

nabisco: A minor example in support of my arguments is the "New Fowler's" fiasco. I won't say that the example proves the point, but this bit of a review from Amazon really demonstrates the sentiment in question:

The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, the first revision in more than 30 years, has not arrived without controversy. Some language (and Fowler) purists complain that the book is too liberal at times, noting that usage is common as opposed to correct.

"Common as opposed to correct". That's sums up pretty much every point I was chasing in a far tidier bundle.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:44 (eighteen years ago)

Be specific of what you're trying to say.
Why is an idea on thought supposed to be ignored?
Why is thinking aobut how language affects thought bad?

He was using arguments that could have been lifted from the first 20 pages of 'Investigations.'
THAT'S why I mentioned it.

― Windy G Moisture, Saturday, 10 March 2007 05:48 (eighteen years ago)

why are you taking all this so personally windy? as i think somebody pointed out in the thread earlier, as long as you can communicate effectively then this kind of stuff isn't really something to be frothing at the mouth over?

please don't take that to mean that i know nothing of english by the way, as you appear to have taken the liberty of assuming with anyone else disagreeing with your good self..

also, manners appear to be dropping in nu-ilx. that's disappointing.

― darraghmac, Saturday, 10 March 2007 20:53 (eighteen years ago)

why are you taking all this so personally windy?

He really IS autistic. That's not a joke.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 10 March 2007 21:41 (eighteen years ago)

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