Entries tagged with language: english

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Heartbreaker (Pat Benatar)

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Tumblr crosspost (28 February 2021)

I know English orthography is a mess, but I was going over my novel’s beginning at Part One -> Chapter One, Page One, and it struck me that “one” is really terrible spelling for its pronunciation. If I didn’t know better, I’d pronounce it like “own” or “oh-nay”, and instead it’s like “won”?! Awful.

Current Location: Washington

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Tumblr crosspost (11 November 2020)

Today’s favorite wtf line from my reading:

But the systematic roughness of the English genre yields darker riches.

(Still Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition; pg. 204)

Tagged: #his arguments get pretty strained at points and imo this is def one of them but ... just #lol

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Listen To Your Heart (Roxette)

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Tumblr crosspost (2 November 2020)

I’m not sure why it is, but one of the little tics that I’ve noticed in student work/fic/video games/etc is omitting commas around names.

That is, usually when using a name, it’s like: “Isn’t that right, Ana?” or “Zahra, this belongs to you.”

But I’ve seen the commas left out a lot across various media (“Isn’t that right Ana?”). It’s not some terrible wrongdoing or anything; I’m just curious why that usage in particular gets dropped so often and so widely.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Someone Like You (Adele)

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Tumblr crosspost (9 October 2020)

I reblogged a thread started by someone complaining about the English pronunciation of "queue" ignoring most letters in the word, someone else pointing out that English "stole" it from French and it follows the rules of French orthography, the thread continuing with further English-French spats about the complicated rules of French orthography vs English's chaotic evil approach (not how they put it, lol), and my friend

tulina (from Catalonia) saying "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

I said:

On the one hand: fair. On the other hand: it’s mainly French that screwed up English spelling, so…

Tagged: #normans: we have created a new form of speech! #everyone else: you fucked up a perfectly good language is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety #though seriously it is one hundred percent fair to judge anglophones for complaining about anyone's orthography :P

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Illumination (Jennifer Thomas)

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?????

Huh, my very anodyne Tumblr post about preferring "liberation" to "freedom" apparently bothered people? Usually people say nothing, but so far there's:

- serious responses about the different functions of the words
- someone aghast at my using "US American"
- a correction
- someone inquiring if maybe it's just classism on my part because of the Tumblr-oversimplified schema of OE words = peasantry and French words = ruling class

............?