7 ms·

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") ca

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned: * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they"). Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender. * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".) * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up"). * Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat"). One thing I am very said about is just how lack luster both of my kid's hand writing is. My eldest is in high-school and her hand writing is horrible. Partly because she has little use for long-form writing (forget cursive) and because they rely on the spell checker.

mostlysimilar 2y ago
> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up"). Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things, but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.
- nmeofthestate 2y ago
  I think organisations (companies, teams) being singular/plural differs depending on what country you're in, so perhaps this is a bleeding across of conventions due to globalisation.
jasonpeacock 2y ago
Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
- nmeofthestate 2y ago
  You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popular among younger writers.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall. I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.
      - DonHopkins 2y ago
        German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects. Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong. But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird. The person doth protest too much, methinks.
ghayes 2y ago
Is “search it up” much different from a similar phrase “search for it”? The structure of the original quote is “imperative verb, direct object, adverb” but I wouldn’t call that a change in grammar so much as a change in diction.
- layer8 2y ago
  It’s adapted from “look it up”. Or maybe more specifically, it’s “look it up using internet search”.
unsupp0rted 2y ago
I bet her calligraphy sucks too. And is she any good at milking a cow? In 2024 there's no need to feel sad about deprecated (or now niche) skills being lackluster. I'd be more concerned if she couldn't find information efficiently when she goes searching for it. That's a skill that mustn't be lackluster.
zargon 2y ago
> Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") I thought this was just a difference between American and British English.
- emaro 2y ago
  It's the first time I see a company's name used like that.
ldoughty 2y ago
Being an old grey beard you probably know these... but for others: > * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".) Prior to movable type printing presses, the British "logical quotation" system was the norm for English. This changed, and is credited to american newspapers, because of movable type. I've heard different reasoning (from being less likely to break, or to looking cleaner), but both point to printers. Even the alternate name for this quotation style is "typesetters quotation." <== the period inside the quote to end that sentence! Being a form of mass media, this meant that a lot of mass produced works now 'promoted' by proxy this typesetters quotation style. Source for some more info on the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up"). This is purely branding. In the US, if people say "Google it", it creates a synonym between "Google" and "Search", which hurts cases for Google in defending their brand... If it gets too weak, then you or I could make a "Google Booster" company, which focuses on improving search engine rankings in general -- not just Google, and with no direct business relation with Google See: Kleenex, Band-aid, ChapStick, Crock-pot, Jacuzzi
OJFord 2y ago
> Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat"). Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc. It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading. Another corruption triple like that is to do something 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.
- int_19h 2y ago
  "go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American English.
talideon 2y ago
Your "plural singulars" have been the normal way of doing things in much of the Anglosphere outside of North America for quite some time.
cubefox 2y ago
> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.

mostlysimilar 2y ago

> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up"). Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things, but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.

nmeofthestate 2y ago
I think organisations (companies, teams) being singular/plural differs depending on what country you're in, so perhaps this is a bleeding across of conventions due to globalisation.

jasonpeacock 2y ago

Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

nmeofthestate 2y ago
You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popular among younger writers.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall. I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects. Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong. But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird. The person doth protest too much, methinks.

ghayes 2y ago

Is “search it up” much different from a similar phrase “search for it”? The structure of the original quote is “imperative verb, direct object, adverb” but I wouldn’t call that a change in grammar so much as a change in diction.

layer8 2y ago
It’s adapted from “look it up”. Or maybe more specifically, it’s “look it up using internet search”.

unsupp0rted 2y ago

I bet her calligraphy sucks too. And is she any good at milking a cow? In 2024 there's no need to feel sad about deprecated (or now niche) skills being lackluster. I'd be more concerned if she couldn't find information efficiently when she goes searching for it. That's a skill that mustn't be lackluster.

zargon 2y ago

> Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") I thought this was just a difference between American and British English.

emaro 2y ago
It's the first time I see a company's name used like that.

ldoughty 2y ago

Being an old grey beard you probably know these... but for others: > * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".) Prior to movable type printing presses, the British "logical quotation" system was the norm for English. This changed, and is credited to american newspapers, because of movable type. I've heard different reasoning (from being less likely to break, or to looking cleaner), but both point to printers. Even the alternate name for this quotation style is "typesetters quotation." <== the period inside the quote to end that sentence! Being a form of mass media, this meant that a lot of mass produced works now 'promoted' by proxy this typesetters quotation style. Source for some more info on the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English > * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up"). This is purely branding. In the US, if people say "Google it", it creates a synonym between "Google" and "Search", which hurts cases for Google in defending their brand... If it gets too weak, then you or I could make a "Google Booster" company, which focuses on improving search engine rankings in general -- not just Google, and with no direct business relation with Google See: Kleenex, Band-aid, ChapStick, Crock-pot, Jacuzzi

OJFord 2y ago

> Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat"). Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc. It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading. Another corruption triple like that is to do something 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.

int_19h 2y ago
"go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American English.

talideon 2y ago

Your "plural singulars" have been the normal way of doing things in much of the Anglosphere outside of North America for quite some time.

cubefox 2y ago

> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.") I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.