"substitute with" again

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Wed Mar 8 01:53:19 UTC 2006


Sorry to break the news, but I hear "irregardless" more often than "regardless."

  One of my good friends holds an important position in the state judiciary and
  uses "irregardless" exclusively.

  Whether he *writes* it, I don't know.

  JL
Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "substitute with" again
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Maybe it'll just die out all by itself, as "irregardless" and "forMIDable"
appear to have done, knock wood.

Does anyone know off the top of his/her/their head how you say,
"replace X with Y" / "substitute X for Y" in, e.g. German? I have a vague
inkling in the back of my thinking cap that there's some common foreign
language that has some inside-out way of saying that that may have
influenced the English of the pswaydo-learned.

-Wilson

On 3/7/06, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Laurence Horn
> Subject: "substitute with" again
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
------
>
> It still sounds very odd to me, but I'm beginning to accept that it
> really is creeping into standard usage, at least for some. I was
> looking at an impressive retrospective of Hokusai, the great 19th
> century Japanese artist, at the Smithsonian Asian museum in D.C. this
> weekend, where one of the many descriptive plaques read in part as
> follows:
>
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
> The image is based on a story in which Nichiren encounters a
> beautiful woman who reveals her true form as that of a seven-headed
> serpent, but in this painting Hokusai has substituted the serpent
> with the more familiar dragon.
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>
> --for me, this would have had to be either "replaced the serpent with
> the more familiar dragon" or "substituted the more familiar dragon
> for the serpent". The curatorial prose on these plaques was
> otherwise as stylistically dignified as you'd expect--no contractions
> or any trace of colloquialisms. We're definitely tracking an ongoing
> linguistic change in formal English... (Wilson, I weep with thee.)
>
> Larry
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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