Polling The Poll Of Polls, 2011

[koganbot]

Mark informs us, "This is the time of year when I require a POLL OF ALL THE POLLS, to diminish the absurdly extensive 'end of year' music commentary I am almost certainly never going to get round to reading."

[Poll #1813388]

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

On the apostrophe tip, just looked to till vs until in Fowler and Partridge: they totally disagree, which is pleasing. Partridge says until is always preferable in formal or poetic contexts; Fowler (who I usually defer to) says they are basically interchangeable, with till the more usual, except in a few cases where until has the same pseudo-archaic feel that unto has. Till is actually the older.

Anyway I occasionally encounter 'til in copy, at first taking it to be the product of unnecessary nervousness about propriety -- but (again) it's more common in the US, esp.in song-titles and such. It probably IS the product of unnecessary nervousness about propriety, in fact, but long enough ago and often enough that it's no longer an error.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the apostrophe actually pisses me off mightily, it's the cause of no end of needless worry to no enormous benefit, a classic case of pedantic latterday backformation with quite bad social intent -- i'd be quite happy to see the back of it

[koganbot]

My favorite pointless spelling argument is "all right" versus "alright," since I can't imagine why anyone could possibly care.

Again, I'd had no idea "till" preceded "until."

My favorite usage book by far is Wilson Follett's Modern American Usage, which is somewhat dated (published 1963 and the guy was hardly fresh off the turnip cart when he wrote it), reactionary (he's incapable of understanding why linguists find "right" versus "wrong" problematic), and makes little attempt to be definitive (well, he died before finishing, and it was put together and added to by others, and then someone else decided to update it sometime in the '90s, which I didn't look at since the idea of updating it seemed ridiculous) — he was going to teach people to write, damn it! So, while he's not happy about "contact" as a verb* or "like" as a conjunction, that's not what makes him grab us by the shoulders and start shaking. Basically, he wants people to stop writing bullshit, though that of course is not how he puts it. Has got sections on "educationese," "noun plague," "vogue words." He's also very good on the sound of prose, warning against unintended assonance and accidental sing-song. And his "negatives, the trouble with" probably eliminated more ambiguities from my prose than anything else I've read.

*Impact hadn't impacted us yet.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Will track Follett down: Fowler I like because while he's a crank, he's also funny, he's very down on unnecessary pseudo-show-offy pedantry, and he has a fine sense of how arbitrary English is, with regard to its own rules. He also takes tremendous pains to lay out subtle distinctions.

Partridge is handy because he's Australian, and cuts to the chase much more abruptly: and it's a book you can carry in your pocket.

[koganbot]

Assuming we're talking about the same Partridge (Eric), he seems to be more international than that: born in New Zealand, largely educated in Australia, spent most of his adult life in Britain. I have the 7th Edition of the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Appropriately, I found it, cracked spine and all, sitting next to a dumpster. It doesn't fit in the pocket, probably not even if you're a kangaroo.

Subtitle is Colloquialisms and Catch-phrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames, Vulgarisms, and such Americanisms as have been naturalized. This depends of course on what he means by "solecism," but his subtitle doesn't seem to take in that nonstandard dialects often follow fairly consistent rules of punctuation and pronunciation. E.g. (and this is not in Partridge at all, seeing as he seems to pretty much have avoided Black American English, West Indian English, etc.), when Eminem goes, "When I go out I'm a go out shootin' &mdash I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid," the term "I'm a" isn't slang for "I am going to"; rather, Eminem is bringing in a rule of pronunciation from a nonstandard dialect of English. The rule is, apparently (I'm no linguist and don't hear much everyday Black American English, but this seems right), that what in standard casual English would be "I'm gonna," in Black English would either be "I gon," without the apostrophe-m or the "na" at the end of "gonna," or "I'm na" or "I'm a" (or a variant spelling of the latter: "Ima," "I'ma," "Imma," "I'mma"), which is "I'm [gon]na" or "I'm [gonn]a" with the "gon"/"gonn" dropped. In my extremely nonextensive attention to this matter, this rule seems adhered to strictly: I've never heard "I'm gon," even among white people who generally speak standard or standard colloquial English and occasionally insert Black English for effect. So the rule is understood quickly, even by those who couldn't tell you the rule. (And the reason I can tell you the rule isn't that I intuited it and brought it to consciousness but that I read it somewhere in something someone wrote about Caribbean English.)

Partridge says that "gonna" is "dial. and, esp. in U.S., low coll.," so he presumably understands the difference between dialect and slang, though of course the boundary between the two isn't always clear: slang is within a dialect, rather than a different dialect; but when you insert from one dialect into another, or mix them, which people do often enough, it's hard to say whether you're speaking slang in dialect A or inserting from dialect B, given that an insert from B can over time become established slang — or even standard usage — in A.

As for goin' round and around, it/they are not even in the 7th Edition. (According to Wikip, he wrote over forty books on English alone, so that number does not include his novels and his books on tennis.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes eric; it's true he mainly lived as an adult and taught and studied in britain -- and his books, if his own introduction is to be trusted, were very successful in the US -- but i catch a certain brusque outsider-impatience from his tone, which i've chosen to interpret as antipodean affection-exasperation in respect of the crusty ways of the aged and decadent metropole (he calls fowler "olympian and austere", neither word one i'd use). Anyway, it's the sense that he comes at English English from a slight angle that's useful to me.

i thought i owned his dictionary of slang but if i do i can't find it -- maybe it's at my dad's house: his entry on slang in usage and abusage spends more time outlining how he defines slang versus argot versus cant, and so on... very faint impression perhaps that he worries his proclaimed expertise over there undermines his authority over here?

[koganbot]

"You cannot edit this comment because someone has replied to it." So note that Eminem did not actually say the word "&mdash" in his song "Remember Me?" — though I think perhaps people should occasionally use the word "m-dash" in speech, when they want to make an addendum or parenthesis especially emphatic. E.g.:

"Never stick anything in your ear" ...[pause]... "M-DASH: unless it's your ELBOW."