OT: - More grammar stuff - irreversible binomials | The Boneyard

OT: More grammar stuff - irreversible binomials

HuskyNan

HuskyNan

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Huh, never through about it before. Following Merriam-Webster on Instagram has been oddly fascinating

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"animal, vegetable, mineral"...ha, I had an organic chemistry professor in college that would point to a position on a molecule he drew then ask us if it was an "animal, vegetable, or mineral". Someone would say "carbonyl leaving group" to which he responded, "Yyyyeeeeeesss, you're wrong" then pick on the next victim. Thank you @HuskyNan for reminding me of that trauma decades later. ;):D
 
Some folks call them idiomatic collocations. Different name, same pattern.
 
I gather there's also a hidden rule concerning the order of adjectives in English. When we use several adjectives, there's a coercive sort of order they follow: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose.
 
"Irreversible binomials" sounds like something you don't want your doctor to say that you have.

(For what it's worth, in Italian the phrase for indicating that some thing is "black-and-white" is "bianco e nero" which translates to "white and black".)
 
CL82 said:
(For what it's worth, in Italian the phrase for indicating that some thing is "black-and-white" is "bianco e nero" which translates to "white and black".)
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As a second generation Juventus fan, I approve this message on behalf of the tifosi bianconeri. :)
 
AE (American English) It’s raining cats and dogs.
BE (British English) It’s pissing it down.

to rain heavily:
piss (it) down It's really pissing (it) down here at the moment.

Source; Cambridge Dictionary
 
Bone Dog said:
I gather there's also a hidden rule concerning the order of adjectives in English. When we use several adjectives, there's a coercive sort of order they follow: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose.
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Reminds me of the axiom of sentence structure in German; time, manner, place. One of the dead give aways that one is an American is not following this pattern.
 
Hmmm... As a lapsed physicist with a side of maths, I would have thought that "binary" (as in binary star) was more appropriate than binomial. However, to quote: "When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." But without using Google, who am I quoting?

Two further suggestions for discussion of language, without wanting to hijack this thread:
  1. Careless Concatenation. Running together two words that should be separate, such as "a while" and "a lot".
  2. Sounds-like Syndrome. Apart from common examples such as their/there/they're and compliment/complement, I see a lot of just plain wrong words that make me wonder if people are using voice-to-text software and either not proofreading, or are incapable of recognising errors.
I am fond of saying that English is a dying language, if not dead already! And very few people care...
 
veivoli said:
I am fond of saying that English is a dying language, if not dead already!
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To me, that is a painfully wrong view of what's going on with English. It presupposes that there was some point in the past when English reached its apotheosis and that any changes since then have been, shall we say, decay.

That's bunk! Languages evolve. They change, some more rapidly than others. The changes occur at the level of individual word meanings, tenses and modes going out of fashion, new slang becoming accepted as standard, etc.

Colonial languages like American English tend to be a bit more conservative, holding onto forms that drop out of use in the Mother country. We still use the subjunctive, if only a little. Sometimes they are also sources of vast quantities of new words, as with Brazilian Portuguese. Among the Romance languages, Portuguese still uses such archaic forms as the infinitive tense and, hold onto your hats, the future subjunctive! Spanish and other offshoots of Vulgar Latin abandoned those hundreds of years ago. So it goes with “dying languages”?

Prescriptive grammarians (I am not accusing you of being one of those) seem to prefer some past, unevolved form of a language, and their proscriptive brethren wag fingers at even minor changes. Descriptive grammar accepts the organic changes, and tries to accurately describe a moving target.

I wonder what Longfellow, Irving and Twain would think of the comment quoted above. Where, on a continuum from alive to dead, would they place their own writings, so far removed from Addison and Pope.
</rant]
 
Sifaka said:
To me, that is a painfully wrong view of what's going on with English.
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My error was in not marking this as joke (the dying language bit). Of course languages evolve, and my father used to describe English as a mongrel language, with its borrowing of words from other languages. At least we don't have the equivalent of the Académie Française, trying to hold back the tide. Aside: King Canute (Knut) knew he was going to fail, and that was the point he was trying to make.

I could relate a long and, to me anyway, funny story about the person who accused me of being a pendant when I corrected a spelling error, I leave it as exercise for the reader to imagine my reply.

Interestingly I understand that the English spoken in some remote parts of the USA was much closer to that of the England the early immigrants left than that spoken in England nowadays. I say was as I'm guessing that that great leveler, television, will bring them more in line with other parts of the country.
 
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