"last stitch effort"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 2:48 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> ...As for "supposably" for "supposedly," my guess is
> that there's nothing to prevent it from becoming standard except for it
> to go out of style. Remember "forMIDable"? It's been years since I've
> heard that.

for me, it's british.  AHD4 has a usage note saying that the
first-syllable accent is "traditional", but that the second-syllable
accent is common in british english and *spreading* in american
english.  the AHD panelists strongly preferred first-syllable accent,
but some accepted either pronunciation.

> Unfortunately, "exQUIsite" is still with us.

"unfortunately"??  "unfortunately"??  this is *my* pronunciation.
(AHD4 lists both.)  leave my language alone!

first-syllable accent here strikes me as a bit too, well, exquisite.
these things are just so *hard* for me: am i a plain-talkin' country
boy, or fabulously gay?  <prissy voice>one has rights to both, but one
never knows which persona to display</prissy voice>.

>  In any case,
> realistically speaking, it was too late for prescriptivism in English
> before Beowulf was written down. In fact, it seems to me that even the
> concept of presriptivism is ridiculous. So, I'm basically just joking
> with my appeals to prescriptivism...

well, the proscriptivist [i use this word intentionally] enterprise is
a lot like commanding the tides to recede.  but it seems to be
emotionally satisfying for some people.

> BTW, do you read SF?

very little.  i'm not a snob about it, but most of it doesn't somehow
suit my taste.

>  Are you familiar with the short story, "Shall we
> have a little talk?", by Robert Sheckley? Although I don't think that
> Sheckley had prescriptivism in mind, this story makes a laughing stock
> of it.
>
> The thrust of the story is that there exists a language that has only
> native speakers, because, if a non-native tries to learn the language,
> the very attempt to study it causes the language to change. As a
> consequence, not even a descriptive grammar of the language is
> possible, let alone a prescriptive one.

sounds fascinating.

somewhere there's an annotated bibiography of sf stories/books in which
language issues and/or linguists figure prominently.

arnold