re: English dialects and regional variations

In order to forgive all those crazy variations, it's helpful to me to consider England-English, American English, Australian English, and Canadian English as separate languages, like how Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese.

Choose your flavour!

it reminds me of the time my mother gave me a stephen king novel she had found in the back of a taxi on the way home from an airport. it was a UK edition, and the first time i realized the difference in British English and American English was so pronouced... Particularly, it was the word electric torch instead of flashlight, it struck me as so odd that they thought it was important enough not to adopt our word, or we thought it was important enough no to use theirs. It probably had more to do with the invention of electrically powered handheld lamps occuring in a bit of secrecy at simulataneous times, and the words used in the developemnt process stuck in the respective areas of the world. It would be nice if all us English speakers could agree on the same exact spellings, etc., but practically impossible, due to wide range of differences in geography and cross germination of languages (spanglish in large portions of the southern US where the hispanic community has influenced the local color of English.) perhaps the internet will serve to stabilize the mutations of English, but so far it seems to only highlight it...

Is there an actual date when English and American-English spelling diverged? Does it date back to the printing of a particular dictionary, or was it a gradual thing?

an excellent question, but first you would have to determine if the two were ever alike to begin with... in other words, was the majority of written english at the time of the american colonization conformant to dictionaries? i suspect it was not, and as variations in the written word were set in type and distributed to the masses, this is the mechanism that specifically established the break between geographic regions... and since one could not simply get into a jet and zip across the atlantic, there was no system to readily check conformity of language. in other words, the divergence was a function whose governing variables were mainly distance and time.

someone once told me that American English is more like 16.century English (as Canadian French is more like 17. century French than French French). But I don't rembember if was a reliable source.

Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The South African language (Afrikaans) sounds a lot like 17th century Dutch, or so I'm told.

One thing that I've noticed, and am quite horrified by, is that despite my snobby literary background, I still have some blatant California-isms. I guess 'hella' is a bay area thing for the most part and is not as common in southern California. Man... I remember when I first heard someone say hella and I thought he was... well, hella cool. It was in 1994.

In Contra Costa county, kids say -- get this -- hell of. GOD it just kills me. I love it. It's so.... wrong. I started saying it for a while after I noticed it, just out of sheer rebellious idiocy. It's like hiccough. Here's what the OED has to say about hiccough. It's my current favorite entry:

Hiccup: hicke up, hikup, hickop, hickhop, hecup, hiccop, hickup, hic-cup, hiccup, hiccough.
See also hickock, hicket. Hiccup appears, from its date, to be a variation of the earlier hicock. Hiccough was a later spelling apparently under the erroneous impression that then second syllable was cough, which has not affected the received pronounciation, and ought to be abandoned as a mere error.

Anyway, one californiaism that I've got bad is using "I'm all" in place of "I said" or "I was feeling".

"So he says he'll pay for me, no pressure right, and I'm all I don't even do crank."

I can no longer properly express myself without "I'm all". It now means something different than "I said" or "I was feeling". It's something more. I didn't necessarily say "I don't even do crank," and it wasn't just that I was feeling the sentiment, it was that I somehow radiated the sentiment, or expressed it without saying it verbatum.

"I'm all" is rapidly moving its way East, if the conversations I overhear on campus every day are any indication. The Mr T Experience had a song called "I'm Like Yeah, She's All No."

I keep trying to bring the brilliance of "hella" (I first read it in Thrasher Magazine around 1988, thrilled when I finally heard it years later in Sacto) to Arizona, with little success. My favorite hella variation is the G-rated "hecka", which leads to things like "heckadecka". Like instead of "hella cool" or even "hecka cool" it's just "heckadecka".

I miss those Bay Area shows. All those smart, optimistic kids who bought a lot of t-shirts. Making fun of each other for not breaking 1500 on their SATs. And they all have old iMacs for nighttables and shit. And they speak Fortran to each other.

Sigh.

[edit]

Just remembered. Back in the bad old days, we stayed with a couple guys in Burlingame, I think, after a show. Total skater-punk bachelor pad. In the bathroom, a colony of ants was thriving in the bone-dry bathtub. A note on the rim of the tub itself read, "Yo: there are hella ants in the bathtub."

It was signed "Dude".

Keeping it very quiet at the moment - more news to follow - but there's a slight chance we'll be moving the to Bay Area next year... Should be hella tight if it happens.

Congrats, Bravus! And good luck coping with Bay Area rent!

Two misused words currently burning holes through me: establish and rigor.

Establish: Frequently used by idiots in my profession who are asked to prove or disprove something, 'establish' is what I term a 'black-box' word. It is used to imply that some very complicated, probably proprietary, process was used to arrive at a conclusion. As I heard it today, "We were able to establish that there was no connection," even when I and a few others knew the motherfucker simply hadn't been able even to figure out the basics of the problem and therefore wrote it off as not worth solving. 'Establish' is only rarely challenged, mostly because it's the type of black-box word that low-IQ managers love to hear.

Today's particularly hideous exhibition caused me and my compadres to cook up a fake project proposal which indicates that we intend to establish whether a certain problem exists through the application of the Johnson-Dover Establishmentation Methodology, employing 37 independent metrics of establishicity as well as a 7-dimensional establishion matrix...

RIGOR: "Where's the rigor?" "It doesn't seem very rigorous." "Their work lacks sufficient rigor." These are phrases that drove me out the doors of academe. I sat in so many seminars where this crap was bandied about that I nearly pulled my hair out. And the rage only multiplied when I'd ask people to define rigor. Very few under the age of 30 could throw one out easily. It was an easy, pseudo-scientific way of saying "I don't think the writer worked hard enough," and it was quite often a sign that the reader simply lacked sufficient motivation to dig into the methodology to understand it completely.

I was taken aback when one of my many bosses used it with us for the first time today.

"I want this thing to have lots of rigor."

"Ack! Thpfffft!"

"Is there a problem, Split?"

"What do you mean when you say you want it to have lots of rigor, my friend?"

"Errrrr, I uhhhhh... I guess I mean I want it to be really thorough."

"Then we'd be served well by sticking with 'thorough' and leaving rigor to the coroner, right?"

"Uh, sure."

Best to nip that crap in the bud.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Splitcoil,

I had a girlfriend once that was really bugged by the fact that people would use the word irregardless. This word is not in the dictionary (as far as I can tell). If it meant exactly what it was structured as it would mean something like: lacking without regard or not without regard...

er something. Anyway, I don't think it's a word.

I'm really sick of people using the same adjective over and over again or synonyms of the same adjective. Seriously. English majors/grad students are famous for this. I swear that the grad student that taught my Comp 2 class used the words hugely, greatly, gigantically, enormously. emmensely [sp?] &fuckingC in every sentence. I think to myself: Self (I say), can this person envision anything but very large things? Is there some other comparative that he may use... just to spice things up a bit?

Flerg.

He's probably compensating for something {/Shrek}

Yep, Split, I'm with you on 'rigor' - the only sensible next word in a sentence is 'mortis'.

for all intensive purposes

now that's just dumb. it doesn't actually mean anything!

Earlier this year, I sat down and wrote a letter. With a pen and a piece (actually, many pieces) of paper. It took me a week and six drafts to get it right. As I rested my RSI-ridden fingers, it occured to me that the recent rapid changes to language may be due to our ability to draft and redraft - you don't have to think things through thoroughly (*wince* all those 'th's!) because there's infinite opportunity to go back and change it and get it right later.

that's a corruption of 'for all intents and purposes' - which still doesn't mean a whole lot, and looks like a graft from legalese

yep, that's the one...and you've put a comma before your 'and' :P

So, I have a question: what are the rules re: commas before 'and's? I've never had a definitive answer to this question. I was taught that you never put a comma before 'and', but lately that seems more like the exception than the rule. Any thoughts?

aah, commas. Such trouble, it is. Thing is, I have seen a clear tendency in, say, the last five years or so, for people forgetting how to properly use commas. Maybe it is all due to what SMS is doing to the art of correctly phrasing things, but I see it in English, Italian and Spanish. Sorry, should have written "Italian, and Spanish".
There are hundreds of commas in completely the wrong places, cutting phrases in two parts with no meaning by themselves, and so on. This "comma-and" would be just one more example, or perhaps one of the most clearly spotted examples, of this tendency.
Wishing not to sound too uppity-professor, the correct thing would, indeed, to say and whatever, no commas at all. Yuo write a list of things and separate those things by using commas, except for the last and the penultimate thing, where you substitute the comma with an "and". And that´s it.
Which opens the other possibility I know of. You want to stress a group of things and then, to mphasize one, or better put, the last of them, to really stress it good, you want to make a pause, cause effect (get their attention) and finish. "I think he should be mobbed, thrashed, clubbed, stabbed and dragged through the filth. And shot" (not thinking of anyone, just my brain stopped working and I could not think of a better example). It´s just as an afterthought, to round things up and put the icing to your statement. But when you do that you won´t need a comma, you use a stop.
Except for listings of things, I would guess that now commas are used in front of "ands" when you talk about a series of actions taking place one after the other. But I am not really sure if that is correct. You do something, something else, and something more. Or, as I wrote earlier (quoting myself, now that´s utterly smartass-ish) "...make a pause, cause effect (get their attention), and finish."

MvR

I need to deflate a little, really have to go now.

You put a comma before 'and' when it would create confusion not to, usually because you've used 'and' elsewhere in the sentence. In all other cases you don't.

Lists:"Famous explorers I can think of include Sturt, Hume, Burke and Wills, and Flinders."
Other: "I ate the pies and the pastries, and the children applauded." Try that last one without a comma and see what happens.

You absofreakinlutely do not use commas to indicate audible pauses.

Ah, that makes sense. It tallies up quite nicely with the version a copywriter friend of mine gave me, which is that you can use a comma before 'and' when you use it parenthetically - i.e. you could just as easily put brackets around that part of the sentence.

I like to put a series of commas after each paragraph. Use them as you see fit.


I do remember a medieval history professor telling us that it was thought that pre-Victorian English was thought to have sounded much like current American southern accents. That relly didn't make any sense to me because with the exception of Virginia the southern colonies were all founded last. I believe the theory had something to do with the type of settlers that went to the southern colonies. Of course the professor was a real flake so he could have just made the whole thing up! ,,,,,,,

I dunno. I like the comma in my sentence above: try reading it with no audible pause (pace Rob) and it sounds jumbly. The 'and' is not part of a list of things here, it's the beginning of a new thought. This is one of those ones where I'd rather make it easy for the reader than be strictly grammatical.