confidential to klwalton

[serene]

Me, on the bus this morning, barely under my breath: "No, it *doesn't*,
you idiot!"

(I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by
Bill Bryson, and I got to this paragraph about how spelling changes in
different ways from the changes in pronunciation:

The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more
problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most
people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for half a
century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just
quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time.
Bernstein suggests [in Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage,
page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation -- to
this day many people aspirate four and forty in slightly
different ways -- but this begs the question of why the pronunciation
changed for the first word and not for the second.

)

Comments

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Aargh. There was just a mini-thread on a newsgroup that I read about misuse of this phrase (curiously, the person who launched it by observing that it was one of his major peeves was responding to someone who had, in fact, used it correctly).

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Bill Bryson said that? Woohoo!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Improper use of "begs the question," aside, is it a good book?

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

It's a really fun book from a historical-language-geekery point of view, but there's an aggravating tendency he has to characterize the way other languages do things as inferior to English, and it's getting on my nerves.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Hrm. :/ Are there better books on the subject that you would recommend? clawfoot is very into that sort of thing, so I'm always on the lookout.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-beg1.htm

'The original sense is of a logical fallacy ... [which] was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as petitio principii and then into English in 1581 as "beg the question". Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as "laying claim to the principle".'

I would say, 'petitioning the principle', as in, 'trying to get the answer to prove itself'?

[stonebender.livejournal.com]

Its an awkward phrase anyway. IMHO

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's it, I'm writing a letter.

Not that it'll help, in the end. But it's not a bad thing to have a windmill at which to tilt. It builds character. :) :P

[lcohen]

"impossible dream" earworm!!!

[surelars.livejournal.com]

I makes me exceedingly happy to know that I'm not the only one cursing books (and their authors) in public. I often get the what-a-weirdo-look when I do that.

I do it with language, too, but most of the time it's math or cs type things.

Do you scribble insults in the margin, too?

/Lars

OT - Thought you'd like this

[ptigris.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/cortejo/536182.html?#cutid1