Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
In their dialect, sure. In any given dialect, who knows?
Any speaker of a dialect that isn't West Coast American has likely watched actors who live in Los Angeles try, and fail, to speak their dialect.
My point was that differences between dialects drive a lot of arguments about grammar. If I'm annoyed about the phrase "could care less" then that originates in my native dialect not allowing it. Not being part of the prestige grammar is secondary, as is whether the phrase makes any logical sense.
It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.
My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.
The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.
Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.
Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.
I think the article is incorrect on this though, try always and tell the truth is a perfectly fine albeit slightly anachronistic usage that would mean
Whatever you do you must always try (that is to say not give up), and tell the truth.
One might also assume that you should tell the truth about trying always is the meaning, but at any rate it is not a phrasing that would be out of order a few hundred years ago.
In contrast "try to always tell the truth" and "try always to tell the truth" are both valid and mean the same thing.
"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.
Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)
Included for no real reason: "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
"Try and tell the truth"
Since it clearly should be "try to tell the truth"
However this one, while similar in construction, doesn't actually sound nearly as bad:
"Try and finish the assignment"
It can be fixed the same way ("try to finish") but it also accept GP's form too, which would be "try (to work hard) and (see if you can) finish the assignment". As I say, for whatever reason this second example sounds much more reasonable to me— I think at least in part my brain is much more accepting of a word that feels dropped than one that's misused.
I suspect that's what you're applying to these sentences. "Try and finish the assignment" makes some sense under this rule if you read it as "Try [the assignment,] and finish the assignment" -- an "assignment" is a thing that makes sense to "try". ("He tried [sushi,] and liked sushi" works for the same reason.) But "Try [the truth,] and tell the truth" doesn't work -- it doesn't make sense to interpret "trying" the truth as some separate action you're taking before you "tell" it.
So probably you just don't have the article's special try-and "pseudo-coordination" rule in your dialect.
For example, in “let’s try and finish this” it does not mean trying then finishing, it is try to finish. The construction is more obvious in a phrase like “try and stop me”. This phrasing is very common in movies, it might just not be as popular in your area.
OED calls it a “nonstandard or humorous use” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Irreg...
If that were the meaning, you would be able to say things like “I stubbed my toe and it hurts so bad I’m figuratively dying”, mirroring the colloquial meaning of “literally”. But nobody says this.
The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier, see e.g. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/literally
Oh, and by the way, the “traditional” meaning isn’t even the first one. According to my OED second edition, “literal” meaning “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” is only attested since 1599.
The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
That meaning comes from the Latin "littera"/"litera", meaning letter or character. Words like "transliteration" are based on this root meaning (https://www.etymonline.com/word/transliteration)
Here's the page for "literal": https://www.etymonline.com/word/literal
"it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too. It's more than an intensifier, it also means "figuratively".
No, its an intensifier for things which are contextually unambiguously figurative. It doesn't communicate that the use is figurative, it communicates intensity. The figurative nature of the expression is understood from context, not the use of the word "literally".
That is not the same as the meaning of “figuratively”!
“‘Literally’ is used with statements that are meant figuratively” does not mean the same thing as “‘Literally’ means ‘figuratively’”.
> "it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too
Indeed, because “intensely” is not an intensifier. In your example, “intensely” modifies “dying”, whereas “literally” modifies the tone of your utterance.
For an example of another intensifier: “it hurts so bad I’m fucking dying” would work.
Nobody would claim that “fucking” means the same thing as “figuratively” in this sentence, even though the sentence is itself figurative.
"Literally" is used as an intensifier in two situations:
1. When speaking neither figuratively nor hyperbolically -- i.e., when the thing you're saying is... er, literally true. (e.g., "The beach is literally a five-minute walk from my house"; "You literally fold the cravat like this")
2. When speaking either figuratively or hyperbolically (e.g., "My head literally exploded"; "The island was literally catapulted into the 21st century")
I have no problem with the first; I do it myself. It's the second I object to.
Why? The hint is in #1 -- right now, literally is the only word we have to say that this actually really happened, that what's being said is neither figurative nor hyperbolic.
That is, the first is not a generic intensifier. It intensifies it because it's actually true.
Loads of other words that used to perform the same function have become meaningless intensifiers: "really" (from "real"), "very" (from "verily" -> "in truth"), "truly".
I think language should be practical. Double negatives are perfectly understandable and feel to me more poetic (if less logically expressive). Using "they" for a single person of unspecified gender is a practical and long-standing solution to a real problem. "Megabyte" is a lot easier to say than "mebibyte".
And, we need a word to mean "I'm not speaking figuratively or hyperbolically"; we don't need Yet Another Meaningless Intensifier. We have "literally", let's keep it.
People do that all the damn time!!! It's one of the single most abominable practices in modern English.
Sorry, in this thread, I had to!
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
Previous lingua francas such as Latin and French, by comparison, had tens of millions of speakers at most during their heyday, and were less broadly geographically distributed. There are more French speakers in the world today than there were when French was dubbed the lingua franca.
It's difficult to predict how English might evolve, but it's unlikely to undergo a significant global simplification. You already get significantly different dialects in different parts of the world. If anything, if English starts to lose its position as a global language, it will fragment further and pick up new dialect-specific complexities as other local languages mix with it.
Could there be a reversal of this trend? Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, even with the potential for geopolitical instability from global warming, autonomous warfare, the rise of autocrats and other factors.
Can we have also declare war on using "exponentially" in place of "significantly"?
I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)
Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
No living language is only used according to the rules laid down by grammar teachers. The only languages that are are dead languages like Latin with zero native speakers.
> No living language is only used according to the rules laid down by grammar teachers. The only languages that are are dead languages like Latin with zero native speakers.
Well, quite.
What if two non-native speakers say something and understand each other?
There's plenty of mutually-intelligible English spoken outside of primarily English-speaking countries which native English speakers would consider ungrammatical, but that's only relative to their own dialect.
John will both try and kill bandits.
... meaning that John will serve as judge and executioner, if not jury.
By your own logic, "literally" meaning "figuratively" is grammatically correct. Which just goes to show that your logic is wrong. Something can in fact be grammatically incorrect even when said by native speakers.
But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.
In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.
(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.
Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.
You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
Same is true in the US, though ethnicity is in the mix too. White and black Americans are historically distinct cultural groups which speak different dialects (though obviously, since the end of slavery and segregation the groups are mixing more and more). It is no coincidence that varieties spoken by white people ended up as the “standard”.
Only the ones where your manner of speaking doesn't influence how the recipient thinks of you.
Good luck.
It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.
Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.
Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
Ellipses are properly written as three dots.
Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.
"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
It’s okay. I still understood you.
They are all wrong.
The point of science is to understand natural phenomena, not to pass value judgments on them. Biologists’ job is not to decide which out of dogs and cats is “correct”. Why should linguistics be any different?
And who will be the keepers (or should I say gate-keepers) of this glorious collection? And will they prevent Tolkien from spelling plural of dwarf as dwarves? Will they force Cormac McCarthy to use quotation marks?
(jk)
You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.
I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.