Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Tova:
More than you'd think.
Akima:
Spotted on-line: "Half-naked Mum walks in on her son as he is live streaming in just her bra and knickers". For want of a comma the meaning was LOLed.
(click to show/hide)"Half-naked Mum walks in on her son, as he is live streaming in just her bra and knickers", or
"Half-naked Mum walks in on her son as he is live streaming, in just her bra and knickers"?
Is it cold in here?:
A different kind of ambiguity
Method of Madness:
--- Quote from: Akima on 24 Jan 2017, 18:11 ---Spotted online: "Half-naked Mum walks in on her son as he is live streaming in just her bra and knickers". For want of a comma the meaning was LOLed.
(click to show/hide)"Half-naked Mum walks in on her son, as he is live streaming in just her bra and knickers", or
"Half-naked Mum walks in on her son as he is live streaming, in just her bra and knickers"?
--- End quote ---
Either way, that's why you always knock.
Morituri:
Last night I discovered that my wife had never noticed that English male and female pronouns are not in fact dual.
He/She is dual, but Him/Her and His/Hers cover three cases and split them up differently. If you replace all 'his' with 'hers' or all 'him' with 'her' you get it wrong.
Case 1: "This pie is his." and "This pie is hers."
Case 2: "This is his pie." and "This is her pie."
Case 3: "This pie belongs to him." and "This pie belongs to her."
The first two get 'his' and the last two get 'her'.
In spite of never having noticed this, she never ever gets it wrong. It is absolutely automatic, below the level of thought. Our language has little strange things in it that we do without ever noticing.
I learned several different dialects of English growing up. My maternal grandparents were part of an isolated community and spoke something very much like Marlowe's or Shakespeare's English - almost what you'd find in the King James Bible but not quite. Among other things, If we were being good, he'd call us "Thee" and "Thou", but if he ever started calling us "Ye" and "You" then either he was talking to more than one of us, or else we'd messed up and he was starting to be annoyed with us.
You can't imagine how much it grinds my nerves to go to a rennaissance faire and hear actors trying to use "thee" and "thou" (or "who" and "whom" for that matter) and getting the nominative/objective distinction wrong.
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