The Mad Schemes of Dr. Tectonic

The "nauseated"/"nauseous"/"nausea" thing is the only one of these that I don't find myself at all caring about. I think that's because "nauseous" [adj] as you're defining it here means the same thing as "nauseating" [adjective participle of "nauseate"], which I think is unlikely to change meaning.

Forcing people to use either a noun ("I feel nausea") or an adjective past participle ("I feel nauseated") to describe how they feel runs counter to typical English practice ("I feel sad" is the common usage, not "I feel saddened" or "I feel sadness"), and has always seemed pedantic to me.

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Actually, the use of the past participle as an adjective has a long history in most European languages. E.G. "It is colored." and "The area was flattened." This concept has always been very hard for my English-speaking Spanish students to grasp, as we don't really learn formal grammar in schools in most Anglophonic nations.

In some cases, as you point out, either the noun or the past particle-as-adjective is correct, or at least accepted, as in the case of "nausea" and "nauseated" in your example. In other cases, meanings differ, as in "It is color." vs. "It is colored."

"I feel sad" is the common usage, not "I feel saddened" or "I feel sadness"

I would argue that 'feel' is an unusual verb choice for 'saddened', at least without a subjunctive clause following; 'am' would generally make more sense. On the other hand, none if them is strictly speaking incorrect, just some are more common and/or less awkward than others.

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Sure--of course, it's true that there are cases where the past participle is standard (a parallel example to the one I gave: "I feel troubled" has a different meaning from "I feel trouble."). But it's clear that the source of confusion is because the form feels somehow wrong: people expect that to feel nauseous is the correct usage, and I don't know why.

I guess that any time that such a linguistic "error" is common speech, we need to ask why it's happening, and if the "correct" meaning can be conveyed in another perfectly reasonable way. The example of "nauseous," to me, seems like one where there's not much worth worrying about, because "nauseating" is unambiguous.

[By contrast, I'll fight forever before I stop using was/were subjunctive, where the distinction does seem important to me.]

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[By contrast, I'll fight forever before I stop using was/were subjunctive, where the distinction does seem important to me.]

I concur. Ah, the joys of an unregulated, living, language. :)

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dpolicar

Related to past participles... I recently discovered that "nake" was once a verb, meaning "to remove the clothes of", but has dropped out of usage in all forms except "naked". I'd like to revive it.

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Cool. So one can nake oneself, or another. Could one nake a peach or an orange?

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dpolicar

Presumably only if it was clothed to begin with.

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I don't see why not...

yes, dan? >> oed nake
... To make naked, in various lit. and fig. senses; to bare, lay
bare, strip, unsheathe, etc. ...
...
1607 TOURNEUR Rev. Trag. V. i, Come, be ready: nake
your swords; thinke of your wrongs
...

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I ♥ the OED.

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Even better, though, is to have it as a Unix command.

[We have the miniaturized, 4-page-on-a-page, version at home. But the Unix one is a lot easier to use...]

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madbodger.livejournal.com

This came up with me and

amyntas the a while back when one of us misspelled "make me". Heh.

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Good point! The nauesa(ted)/nauseous one may be unsalvageable for that very reason.

There are far too many stupidities of prescriptive grammar (like "don't split infinitives", or "don't end in a preposition", both of which are perfectly fine in most cases). It's tricky to find the fine line between that nonsense and encouraging precise use of words with subtle distinctions...

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0nce-and-future.livejournal.com

That's what happens when you combine/merge/evolve three separate and extant vocasbulary families, but have the grammar rules imposed from yet another (dead) language. Seriously.

English grammer is teh sux.

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English grammar is actually very simple, in comparison to lots of other languages. I actually like having lots of little grammar-particle words instead of case-markers!

It's English orthography that's completely heinous. I mean, I kinda like it the way it is, honestly, but it's apparently a real bear to learn as a second language.

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Il n'est pas plus difficile d'orthographier que le Français.

Though i'm all for spelling reform. Representing the 40-41 sounds of North American English with 90+ different spellings for various phonemes is tedious at best, even for native speakers. Spelling competitions, to my knowledge, are known only in the English and French speaking parts of the world.

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Spelling reform always sounds like good idea, but then I look at the results and it just feels wrong to me.

One of the neat features of our current spelling system is that it records etymology (and meaning) in addition to pronunciation.

(And I should probably confess that I won a number of spelling bees in elementary school, so the tediosity is lost on me...)

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One of the neat features of our current spelling system is that it records etymology (and meaning) in addition to pronunciation.
I agree. Each new language I study has helped me with my Spelling.

Presumably unlike yourself, i'm dyslexic, which made learning to spell very tedious. Though despite the dyslexia, i still spell better than most.

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I think there's some other kind of spelling bee that's common in Francophone Canada, which is about sounding out homophones, or something like that.

[I won spelling bees when I was a kid, too...]

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You mean like differentiating between Thibideau, Tibidot, & Thibideaux, for example?

(Those are actual surnames of 3 of our Canadian customers, and all 3 are pronounced basically the same, tho Tibidot accents the last syllable, rather than the penultimate, and the final vowel in Thibideaux is a bit longer in duration than the singular.)

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navrins

They are useful, but I think we create new distinctions roughly as fast as we lose old ones. Had I slept more than an hour in the past 28, I'm sure I could come up with some.

Basically, I think everyone should use words the way I learned them, which means you're correct about on the first two points and wrong on the last, "presently" means "soon," not "now," and, um, other things.

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dpolicar

And "momentarily" means "for a moment," not "in a moment." But that one is dead.

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navrins

Sorry, nope. It means both. That's what I was taught, and is Therefore Right.

Reiterate is redundant, but *that* one is dead, and probably rightfully so. (Is anything ever just dundant once?)

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dpolicar

These are mutually exclusive?
Hooray for obnoxious hypercorrectiveness of important distinctions of meaning!
Now if only I can get people to use "nauseous" and "noxious" correctly... and "comprise" and "compose"... and...

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thedragonweaver.livejournal.com

It reminds me of a quotation (ha!) from H. Beam Piper, actually. "[English is] the result of Norman men-at-arms to get dates with Saxon barmaids, and as legitimate as any of the other results."

Distinction of meaning is precisely why it is important to maintain accurate word choice. I had a teacher in high school who would insist that we look up words if we were the least bit unsure of their exact meaning. He had one student look up "red"— for which the definition was "the color of blood." I would prefer a definition that made use of nanometers, myself.

The thing that is most noticeable on the internet is not the loss of precise word meanings but precise phrase meanings. The spelling of one of the words changes, and the phrase loses its historical roots.

"To reign in" loses all meaning through the substitution; in a post-horse era, most people don't realize that pullnig back on reins (REINING in) results in the stopping of a galloping horse. "To tow the line" loses its pugilistic roots, where toeing the line meant following the rules. And there are the myriad phrases for which "loose" is substituted for "lose"; one can use a counter-argument and wonder what, exactly, happens when you LOSE the dogs of war?

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We should start programming spell-checkers to look for common phrases and catch wrong-homophone errors in addition to normal typos...

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flwyd.livejournal.com

Descriptive granularity and vocabulary size don't have a linear relationship. What some languages lack in vocabulary size they make up in modifiers. Languages with aglomerative grammars (German, Turkish, etc.) can keep tacking on sufficies until they get what they want. "The castle on the hill surrounded by soldiers emerging from the water" is, I think, one word in Turkish. And every time you add a suffix, you may change the spelling and/or pronunciation of the previous sufficies. But it would be misleading at best to claim that Turkish had an infinite vocabulary.

This of course holds without aglomerative grammars as well, since you can always add adjectives and adverbs. Having it as a single "word" just makes it less clumsy.

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