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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

This rampant prescriptivism among us frenchies is really tiring after a while. I blame the Académie. Modern French is botched Middle French which is botched Old French which is botched Vulgar Latin which is botched Classical Latin (this last one is a bit incorrect but you get the idea). "Aujourd'hui"'s ethymology is a proof of that.

I agree that repetition for emphasis is an innovation of modern French though. English for instance would never ever do something like that. That would be completely, entirely, absolutely preposterous. I myself wouldn't stand for it.

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> English for instance would never ever do something like that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless

Or one that absolutely drives me nuts:

"A great rate of speed"

Which is a journalist way to say "I failed high school physics, but I'm still going to try to sound smart".

My favorite is still "laxadaisical" for those situations when neither "lax" nor "lackadaisical" are enough.

Or exonerative tense:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative

In which journalists use the passive voice to excuse, e.g., police shootings. "The victim was shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting." Rather than: "the officer shot and killed the victim."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14mistakes.htm...

> This rampant prescriptivism

really threw me off when learning French. I went from the mostly benign and spelling-only prescriptivism of Spanish to the complete and utter anarchy that is English to this weird situation French is in where it's the worst of both worlds: it has all of the rules and all of the exceptions.

In some situations following all of the rules ('course a pied' over 'running' type stuff) will make you positively odd, and in others ignoring some specific rules makes you sound uncultured.

> This rampant prescriptivism among us frenchies is really tiring after a while

I dislike "Au jour d'aujourd'hui" because of the redundancy. There are shorter and more elegant ways to say the exact same thing. I don't know if we can talk about prescriptivism in that case. It just gives a negative impression on the author (like when you see an anti-pattern in computer code).

Au jour du jour d'aujourd'hui, I beg to differ.

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