As N.E.Q has said 'mayor' is generally pronounced in Scotland as 'may-or',even although 'mayor' doesn't really exist. The traditional word used for that officer is 'provost' originally an ecclesiastical term.
In Scotland vowels between two consonants are generally pronounced
as in 'op-e-ra' I find that in England that word is generally pronounced as opra'
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
Dropping the first 'r' in 'February' annoys me. Why do people have to do that? What is it there for? I am perfectly happy to have been born in the month that has a brewery in it.
According to Etymology Online, attendee came to be preferred over the older attender and attendant because the latter two words “had overtones of ‘one who waits upon.’”
Dropping the first 'r' in 'February' annoys me. Why do people have to do that? What is it there for? I am perfectly happy to have been born in the month that has a brewery in it.
If we’re going to start on English words with silent letters, we’re going to be here a long, long time.
According to Etymology Online, attendee came to be preferred over the older attender and attendant because the latter two words “had overtones of ‘one who waits upon.’”
Dropping the first 'r' in 'February' annoys me. Why do people have to do that? What is it there for? I am perfectly happy to have been born in the month that has a brewery in it.
If we’re going to start on English words with silent letters, we’re going to be here a long, long time.
According to Etymology Online, attendee came to be preferred over the older attender and attendant because the latter two words “had overtones of ‘one who waits upon.’”
Dropping the first 'r' in 'February' annoys me. Why do people have to do that? What is it there for? I am perfectly happy to have been born in the month that has a brewery in it.
If we’re going to start on English words with silent letters, we’re going to be here a long, long time.
Dropping the first 'r' in 'February' annoys me. Why do people have to do that? What is it there for? I am perfectly happy to have been born in the month that has a brewery in it.
I've never pronounced it with a brewery in it outside of the most formal of contexts. It's Frebruhry to me.
The festive word was redeemed for me a few November's ago when (early in the month) a neighbour very loudly told her partner to "cheer up its nearly bloody chrimbo".
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
I'm with you on that one, @Enoch. Retiree is the other common usage, which could be correct, but not if the person concerned took the decision to retire themselves.
Also with you, @BT. May be part of the reason so many people don't understand the process of 'declaring an interest' in a formal meeting.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
When I was a lad in the deep dark years before Thatcher I had a local bus company whose buses listed their capacity as "X seated and Y standees"
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
When I was a lad in the deep dark years before Thatcher I had a local bus company whose buses listed their capacity as "X seated and Y standees"
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
When I was a lad in the deep dark years before Thatcher I had a local bus company whose buses listed their capacity as "X seated and Y standees"
It's not new.
Apparently goes back to the 1820s.
Is that horse drawn buses or the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
It just struck me that language isn't fixed. Well, some of it is to a degree, especially grammar. But vocabulary and meaning are not. But I also sympathize, nostalgia is addictive. I miss my grandad saying thou.
Another usage that has been creeping in a lot recently here and which makes my pedantic skin creep is use of the ending 'ee' to describe the actor in something rather than the person receiving the action.
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
When I was a lad in the deep dark years before Thatcher I had a local bus company whose buses listed their capacity as "X seated and Y standees"
It's not new.
Apparently goes back to the 1820s.
Is that horse drawn buses or the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
It just struck me that language isn't fixed. Well, some of it is to a degree, especially grammar. But vocabulary and meaning are not. But I also sympathize, nostalgia is addictive. I miss my grandad saying thou.
Which is an example of grammar changing. Which it does, just as much as anything else. Perhaps not quite as fast as vocabulary but, well, knowst thou not that we speak not in like manner unto our ancestors?
In fact, languages have been observed to potentially follow a grammatical change cycle of isolating -> agglutinative -> inflected and back to isolating. English is currently getting close to isolating from a more inflected old English and a very inflected Proto Indo European, the inflections of which are hypothesised to derive from agglutinative suffixes. Finnish, meanwhile, shows signs of moving from agglutinative to inflected.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
Shakespeare uses "trash" in The Tempest, which I enjoy referring to people complaining about creeping Americanization.
I think there's a difference between changes which make life easier (does the distinction between less and fewer ever make meaning clearer, given that nobody's ever confused by more being opposite to both), and changes that make life harder.
The latter normally happens when somebody thinks they're being insufficiently formal or emphatic and so used a more complicated word to mean something for which there is a simple word available. Management speak is a great degrader of language.
“From the get-go” has its origins in African American Vernacular English. As @KarlLB has said, it probably derives from “getting going.” I’ve certainly been hearing and saying it all my life; it’s normal conversational speech here, and has been for a long time.
As for “what’s wrong with ‘start’ or ‘beginning’?,” why stop there? Why say “start” when we have a perfectly good word in “beginning”?
Surely, one of the strengths of English is that it contains numerous words and phrases that mean essentially the same thing but that convey different shades of meaning, tones, levels of formality, humor or seriousness, etc.
I have been thinking a bit further about this one. If that is the source of 'get-go.' rather than some sport the users of the phrase in the UK almost certainly know little about, and if they are British, white, middle class, educated and middle aged or over does that make their use of the phrase what others condemn as 'cultural appropriation'? Or have I misunderstood that phrase?
Meanwhile, I’ve been reminded this week how my skin crawls just a little when motion is used as a verb in a parliamentary procedure context, as in “I motion that we adjourn.”
I agree with you there. The normal usage is "I move". Using ordinary language in ways that one's hearers are not expecting makes speech harder rather than easier to understand.
Its the appropriation of the slang or pronunciation of another group of speakers - ie middle-aged people using young peoples slang, or Brits using American pronunciations - in order to appear "cool" that really rubs me up the wrong way.
Another annoyance for me is when people use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested".
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
Shakespeare uses "trash" in The Tempest, which I enjoy referring to people complaining about creeping Americanization.
Yes, but did he use 'z's instead of 's-es'?
Shakespeare's English would have been closer to Bostonian and New England English, as well as Ulster English in many respects. But with a Warwickshire accent.
I don't think we dare open the can of worms that is cultural appropriation when it comes to speech. Things are too fluid and people "catch" attractive words and phrases from each other, almost unknowingly--really, in most cases, I bet they couldn't even tell you where they picked something up!
So it becomes a fruitful source of anger and hatred with no way of proving the actual "appropriation"--did I hear it from my kid, or directly from the [insert ethnic group of your choice] ? Must I research every expression I use before I open my mouth?
Just catching up with @sionisais' idea of Scottish pronunciation of their capital city ? Are you referring to Embra, as it is sometimes called ?
City and town names will always have their own local pronunciation such as Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. This is not pronounced as Roth-e-say
but rather Roth-say or indeed popularly as 'Rossi' It is important as Duke of Rothesay is the title of the Prince of Wales in Scotland.
Is it a new thing to say "to be fair" when you mean "to be honest" or have I just recently started to notice it?
I think it's been around a long time but has only recently become common. My son in law and his pals say it all the time.
We used to say 'fair play' - chwarae teg at times - in South Wales or 'fair do's' as in 'fair do's mind, he do work hard now isn't it?'
We also used to say, 'To be honest' all the time.
It featured a lot in the dialogue in the TV comedy Gavin and Stacey which very accurately portrayed South Walian speech.
We'd say, 'No word of a lie ...' or 'I wouldn't lie to you ...' to prefix statements.
There's a story of a TV or radio reporter or a 'Mass Observation' observer or market researcher (depending on the version) conducting interviews in Abertillery (pronounced Aber-till-AIR-y) on the subject of attitudes to work.
He came back saying, 'These people all want to be driven and to work hard. They kept saying they wanted to be "harnessed"'.
Is it a new thing to say "to be fair" when you mean "to be honest" or have I just recently started to notice it?
I had to think about that, as I use 'to be fair' quite often. I use it when I am trying to imply balance in a discussion. 'To be honest' has a different meaning and seems to imply that I think you think I might not be, so I rarely say it.
Is it a new thing to say "to be fair" when you mean "to be honest" or have I just recently started to notice it?
“To be fair” and “to be honest” aren’t interchangeable where I am, at least as I hear them used. “To be honest” is used to mean “what I really think is . . . .” “To be fair” is used to preface an attempt to state an opinion or position you don’t agree with but are trying not to mischaracterize.
Originally posted by Gamma Gamaliel: He came back saying, 'These people all want to be driven and to work hard. They kept saying they wanted to be "harnessed"'.
I'd use "harnessed" but in Scots. "Early yokit, late lowsed" is a complaint about a long working day - in the harness early, not unharnessed until late. Or "early yokit, nae lowsed yet" means I started early and am still not finished.
I've never used "yokit" or heard anyone else use it, as something to be desired, though!
The NE Man and I had one of our not-infrequent bouts of mutual incomprehension today. My husband was driving and I gave him the clear instruction "At the junction, take the bendy-round road, not the straight ahead road." The most cursory observation should have made the route clear. Why he went straight ahead I do not know. If I am driving, instead of giving me clear instructions, he introduces abstract concepts, namely "left" and "right" neither of which I find helpful.
I therefore nominate "left" and "right" as words I hate.
Is it a new thing to say "to be fair" when you mean "to be honest" or have I just recently started to notice it?
“To be fair” and “to be honest” aren’t interchangeable where I am, at least as I hear them used. “To be honest” is used to mean “what I really think is . . . .” “To be fair” is used to preface an attempt to state an opinion or position you don’t agree with but are trying not to mischaracterize.
Obviously it has the effect of making the speaker sound less trustworthy.
Not necessarily. I generally hear “not gonna lie” used in a context where it means something along the lines of “I’m not going to tell you a white lie to spare your feelings.”
No, it doesn't mean 'I'm not going to lie' and as @Baptist Trainfan says it's more of a reinforcement or underlining of what the speaker is saying.
Elsewhere it might be, 'To tell you the truth ...' which doesn't mean that the speaker is normally lying.
@Nick Tamen - you would have to see Uncle Bryn's quote in context and be au fait with regional British idioms to get the comedic effect.
Equally, I know that 'Bless your heart' in Southern US speech isn't necessarily intended in a benign way - quite the opposite. I only know that because of American films and TV.
I wouldn't expect US or other non-British Shipmates to pick up on the quirkiness of South Walian speech and to be honest with you, no word of a lie, I wouldn't expect British Shipmates to do so either unless, like Baptist Trainfan, they've moved to South Wales or they were fans of Gavin and Stacey.
As a general rule, I'd say most British people were more aware of quirkiness in Cockney, West Country, Liverpudlian or Geordie speech than they are of how people speak in South Wales - other than recognising the sing-song accent on the penultimate syllable.
As for Scottish and Nor'n Irish idioms, some are familiar but others far less so. @North East Quine could baffle all of us with some of her local idioms.
I have a friend from Dundee who has some fantastic turns of phrase I've not heard before.
Comments
In Scotland vowels between two consonants are generally pronounced
as in 'op-e-ra' I find that in England that word is generally pronounced as opra'
That appears to be at odds with the Scots pronunciation of their capital city? Or is that simply word play?
The one I most frequently hear is 'attendee' to describe a person who attends a meeting. The person who goes to a meeting is an 'attender'.
Nobody, I hope, gets 'lessor' and 'lessee' the wrong way round. And so far, I have been spared 'sellee' rather than 'seller'. So why 'attendee' and where does it come from? Listen out and you will almost certainly find it is not the only example.
If we’re going to start on English words with silent letters, we’re going to be here a long, long time.
Well - we are in hell!
I've never pronounced it with a brewery in it outside of the most formal of contexts. It's Frebruhry to me.
Also with you, @BT. May be part of the reason so many people don't understand the process of 'declaring an interest' in a formal meeting.
It's one of its meanings now. May not always have been but definitely is now. I think it's possibly because "interest" has narrowed in meaning from "matters that have implications for us" to "matters in which we take active notice or are fascinated by". That leaves "disinterested" as "having no dog in the fight" in a counterintuitive semantic space.
When I was a lad in the deep dark years before Thatcher I had a local bus company whose buses listed their capacity as "X seated and Y standees"
It's not new.
Yes, a lot of the annoyance that people feel seems to be over language change. As you say, "disinterested" is changing its meaning. I suppose people just don't like it, but, let's face it, it has always happened and always will.
Is that horse drawn buses or the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
And quite often the "new usages" are far older than the people complaining about them. Examples abound on here.
It just struck me that language isn't fixed. Well, some of it is to a degree, especially grammar. But vocabulary and meaning are not. But I also sympathize, nostalgia is addictive. I miss my grandad saying thou.
Don't know, sorry.
Which is an example of grammar changing. Which it does, just as much as anything else. Perhaps not quite as fast as vocabulary but, well, knowst thou not that we speak not in like manner unto our ancestors?
In fact, languages have been observed to potentially follow a grammatical change cycle of isolating -> agglutinative -> inflected and back to isolating. English is currently getting close to isolating from a more inflected old English and a very inflected Proto Indo European, the inflections of which are hypothesised to derive from agglutinative suffixes. Finnish, meanwhile, shows signs of moving from agglutinative to inflected.
Shakespeare uses "trash" in The Tempest, which I enjoy referring to people complaining about creeping Americanization.
The latter normally happens when somebody thinks they're being insufficiently formal or emphatic and so used a more complicated word to mean something for which there is a simple word available. Management speak is a great degrader of language.
I agree with you there. The normal usage is "I move". Using ordinary language in ways that one's hearers are not expecting makes speech harder rather than easier to understand.
Yes, but did he use 'z's instead of 's-es'?
Shakespeare's English would have been closer to Bostonian and New England English, as well as Ulster English in many respects. But with a Warwickshire accent.
Yes, but yours has a lower-case 'o' not an uppercase one.
So it becomes a fruitful source of anger and hatred with no way of proving the actual "appropriation"--did I hear it from my kid, or directly from the [insert ethnic group of your choice] ? Must I research every expression I use before I open my mouth?
Let's not go there.
That depends on which case I choose to use.
City and town names will always have their own local pronunciation such as Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. This is not pronounced as Roth-e-say
but rather Roth-say or indeed popularly as 'Rossi' It is important as Duke of Rothesay is the title of the Prince of Wales in Scotland.
That is true, point taken.
We lived in Norfolk for years and about a quarter of places have names pronounced totally unlike the way they are written.
I think it's been around a long time but has only recently become common. My son in law and his pals say it all the time.
We used to say 'fair play' - chwarae teg at times - in South Wales or 'fair do's' as in 'fair do's mind, he do work hard now isn't it?'
We also used to say, 'To be honest' all the time.
It featured a lot in the dialogue in the TV comedy Gavin and Stacey which very accurately portrayed South Walian speech.
We'd say, 'No word of a lie ...' or 'I wouldn't lie to you ...' to prefix statements.
There's a story of a TV or radio reporter or a 'Mass Observation' observer or market researcher (depending on the version) conducting interviews in Abertillery (pronounced Aber-till-AIR-y) on the subject of attitudes to work.
He came back saying, 'These people all want to be driven and to work hard. They kept saying they wanted to be "harnessed"'.
I had to think about that, as I use 'to be fair' quite often. I use it when I am trying to imply balance in a discussion. 'To be honest' has a different meaning and seems to imply that I think you think I might not be, so I rarely say it.
He came back saying, 'These people all want to be driven and to work hard. They kept saying they wanted to be "harnessed"'.
I'd use "harnessed" but in Scots. "Early yokit, late lowsed" is a complaint about a long working day - in the harness early, not unharnessed until late. Or "early yokit, nae lowsed yet" means I started early and am still not finished.
I've never used "yokit" or heard anyone else use it, as something to be desired, though!
The NE Man and I had one of our not-infrequent bouts of mutual incomprehension today. My husband was driving and I gave him the clear instruction "At the junction, take the bendy-round road, not the straight ahead road." The most cursory observation should have made the route clear. Why he went straight ahead I do not know. If I am driving, instead of giving me clear instructions, he introduces abstract concepts, namely "left" and "right" neither of which I find helpful.
I therefore nominate "left" and "right" as words I hate.
And "with all due respect" seems to imply not much respect is due
Same here on the other side of the US.
Around here, sometimes yes, sometimes no. But "I will give your idea all due consideration" usually means "I've already decided it's worthless."
There were calories used as 'fillers' without carrying much meaning at all.
That is almost reasonable. Describing a person as “a random” or “this random” is truly weird.
You can add “rammed” to the words from Heck for “crowded” where I would possibly, but not often, use “crammed”.
Sod it, I’m getting old. Unless it’s actually something I’ve not come across before, my vocabulary hasn’t moved on since about 1980.
“Not gonna lie” is another. I didn’t think you were going to lie!
'I wouldn't lie to you, vicar ...'
As if the vicar were expecting him to do so.
Obviously it has the effect of making the speaker sound less trustworthy.
Rather like using the word 'genuine'.
Or the old Hughie Green line if anyone is old enough to remember him here in the UK:
'And I mean that most sincerely folks, I really do ...'
Yeah, right.
I think it's more a reinforcement to, or underlining of, what the speaker is saying.
I think that's right. It's an idiom, and doesn't really mean I'm not going to lie.
Elsewhere it might be, 'To tell you the truth ...' which doesn't mean that the speaker is normally lying.
@Nick Tamen - you would have to see Uncle Bryn's quote in context and be au fait with regional British idioms to get the comedic effect.
Equally, I know that 'Bless your heart' in Southern US speech isn't necessarily intended in a benign way - quite the opposite. I only know that because of American films and TV.
I wouldn't expect US or other non-British Shipmates to pick up on the quirkiness of South Walian speech and to be honest with you, no word of a lie, I wouldn't expect British Shipmates to do so either unless, like Baptist Trainfan, they've moved to South Wales or they were fans of Gavin and Stacey.
As a general rule, I'd say most British people were more aware of quirkiness in Cockney, West Country, Liverpudlian or Geordie speech than they are of how people speak in South Wales - other than recognising the sing-song accent on the penultimate syllable.
As for Scottish and Nor'n Irish idioms, some are familiar but others far less so. @North East Quine could baffle all of us with some of her local idioms.
I have a friend from Dundee who has some fantastic turns of phrase I've not heard before.
But that's getting Heavenly not Hellish.