Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
LTK:
I read in a column yesterday that the English 'you' is actually akin to the German 'Sie' as a plural/formal pronoun, whereas 'thou' was the informal pronoun until it fell into disuse, which is funny considering that saying 'thou' would nowadays be considered ridiculously formal!
sitnspin:
It's not that using "thou" would be considered formal persay, just archaic and strange.
Carl-E:
...unless you're old order Amish.
On another note entirely, I was composing a quicnk email to my students about this last week of class before the final, when it suddenly came to my attention that the phrases "slim chance" and "fat chance" have essentially the same meaning.
It's really hard to use the latter without a sarcastic tone of voice, though!
Method of Madness:
They probably mean the same thing because fat chance is only used sarcastically.
Is it cold in here?:
Somewhere else, the topic was about a US person who wanted to move to Europe, handicapped by a criminal record.
"He would not be allowed to live in the Netherlands" instantly says to a native speaker that the government would forbid him to move there. No humor, no ambiguity.
What was actually said was
--- Quote ---In the Netherlands he would not be allowed to live.
--- End quote ---
To a native speaker the immediate interpretation is that the Netherlands discriminates against ex-convicts to a lethal degree.
Yet the two are grammatically equivalent.
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