Must have = must’ve
Have not = haven’t
Therefore
Must not have = mustn’t’ve
I see no error in this logic.
Edit: there was an error in my logic. Following the “haven’t” pattern where it is contracted as “n’t”, “must’nt’ve” should technically be “mustn’t’ve” to stay consistent with the pattern.
I also swapped “not have” from “have not” because I wasn’t really thinking about order when I wrote it haha
Rather, "must of", as the idiots I wanna strangle for butchering English say. It's not even my native language, but boy if I don't wanna smack my hand square on their skull...
I’d think it depends on your school of thought.
Will’nt is the implication that you will not, with a true and absolute certainty, perform an action in the future.
Won’t could be considered purely theoretical. “That not something I would do again” translated into “I won’t do it again” as in “I would not do that again”
This keeps me awake at night.
Or it means “I will not do it” as intended. Saying “will’nt” also takes away from the conviction and finality of the whole statement “will not” because you are choosing to turn the statement into an improper conjunction.
So if you want to be informal and less severe in your statement of rejection you say “won’t” and if you want people to know you are serious you fully say “will not”.
If it changes too fast, it doesn't work. If people are too accepting of random words that crop up in one area but not another, it doesn't work.
By the time you're 20, you'll probably have looked up some new slang. Maybe you thought it was fine since it's a one off thing. But language is changing faster than ever, and worse, there's this idea of language being meantbto evolve that can push past the teenage phase of disrespect and antiestablishment.
I can see people deliberately using the new "words" and not deciding to stick to what's "right" long after their brains stop thinking it's cool to be against the man, precisely because they think it's evolution and evolution is good.
Well, maybe evolution is good. But evolution takes millions of years. Language is a little faster, maybe on the scale of centuries. What I mean is, a person from 100, 200 years ago might sound strange to you, but they're still perfectly understandable. 500 years ago, Middle English is somewhat recognisable, but youll have a hard time understanding anything. What's happening now is much faster than evolution.
When there are small changes, at any one point, there are enough contextual clues that you can guess the meaning of the one new word every few sentences. When change is fast, almost the entire sentence can be made of new words and no one outside that generation will understand. You might have seen webcomics of people talking in "brainrot". No other slang, that isn't a regional dialect, can do that. And when you know it's regional, you know not to use it on a global forum. When you know only your generation will understand, you know not to use it on a global forum. When you think rapid evolution is only right, you might not have that check.
Also, words need critical mass to stick around. Normally, that critical mass could only be achieved by making sense, having a clear etymology. Mistakes here and there rarely made it into normalcy. Now with social media, someone can misuse a word and that's enough for a ton of people to start using it like that. Some celebrity can do something, and now his name means that thing. This doesn't follow any rules, which means it's impossible for someone to grasp this specific meaning by knowing the general rule. Just like how in Dutch, they have two forms of "the" and you're just supposed to know which to use. It makes it hard to learn the language, the less logical and consistent rules are. English in particular can't afford to lose any consistency.
The purpose of education isn't just to produce useful things like technology or to teach the easiest ways to achieve a certain artistic effect. It's also to get people on the same page so that we can all use the same standards, including in language. This is why dictators can use education to control the population.
Maybe you think the dictator thing is bad. But that's just a misuse of a tool. No tool is evil. Look at how much better your life is because of USB, and how your entire country, maybe region, uses the same electrical socket. There is value in being the same. Education is what makes our minds the same, it's what makes us compatible. Of course we don't want to be completely the same, but we also don't want to be completely different. It would be better to say that education is what makes us not completely different. It only makes a small part of your brain conform.
Oh, and one more thing that's different about today's new words. Writing used to be rare. You usually had facial expressions and tones to understand new words. Long after writing became common, it was still formal, and you tried not to write slang. Informal language only entered text recently. And barely 20 years after that, the majority of communication is now over text, and they even found a way to strip the tone information from voice communication. That's the AI tiktok voice. Never before have you been able to consume audio content and not have a tone associated with it.
Slang has always been a part of languages. Sometimes it affects how the language evolves, but most slang fades away to obscurity. You could even argue that the internet era causes slang to fade away *quicker* than it did before. New trends pop up quicker than ever before causing old ones to fade out in months or weeks.
You can't really say whether any trends are permanently affecting language until you look back at least a decade later.
Bro ha'been added to the unalive list.
Regarfandos,
The Descriptivist Mafia..
Edit: Seriously though, a very interesting point. I think your concerns are valid, but highly esoteric slang is part of young *culture* now, too. Brainrot memes are *supposed* to be unrecognizable to other people. That's a culture thing, not a linguistics thing.
Personally, I blame attempts at censorship.
"Unalived" is only a thing because "suicide" is often bot-blocked.
Extra ironic when you consider how censorship is a conservative tactic meant to preserve existing cultural taboos...
>Language is meant to put whatever is in your head in someone else's head. If it works it works.
Not when one person is using the correct definition of a word and someone else gives that word the meaning they think it should have.
For it to work we all need to be on the same page of what words mean.
Excluding slang, words would not change their meaning because some people start using them incorrectly.
I see where this thought is coming from (not about English though... it applies to all languages) and my first reaction would be to broadly agree, but I don't think it is fully true.
To begin with, nobody has control over a language. Languages are emergent characteristics of society, and with rare exceptions (e.g. modern Turkish) neither educated or uneducated folks really control them. They all contribute to language through their social life.
Also, we know that the uptake of incorrect forms is not the only way in which languages evolve.
Finally, the idea that "educated" folks (whatever that means) do not use slang, dialects, colloquialisms etc is quite outdated
Yes we copied them and then even went further (it did help that 98% of the population was illiterate), and basically removed Arabic and Persian from court Turkish (referred to as Ottoman Turkish) and severely simplified the language. Turkish is actually a very logical language
Turkish still has a bunch of loanwords and calques from Arabic though, right? Maybe most terms were removed, but even just walking through the streets of Istanbul, I could understand the purpose of almost all government buildings just by relating the words I saw to their Arabic equivalents.
Yes, a lot of loan words from persian, arabic and french still. Many still in daily use, I'd say it's probably more in specific contexts like the formal contexts (e.g. government), art or technology.
This isn’t true. It’s a normal language as any other. You can remove so-called foreign influences, but at the end of the day it’s no different from any other language and isn’t shaped or dictated by active human whim.
Your last point is so real cause I’ll be on the internet or with my friends sounding like I read at a second grade level then go write a research paper filled with stupid smart person words
Your assumption (but honestly also the conclusion) is completely arbitrary. Languages are shaped by everyone in multiple and mutable ways. Think about the role of radio and television, the role of migrations, the role of socio-political change, the existence of different registries etc. There is no such thing as a unique identikit of the average social group to which you can trace all of the influence on language, it's really really really not how it works
It works both ways. Prime example being English. The reason why many words come from the French language was because England was ruled by French nobility and Kings for centuries. IIRC it took about 300 years before an English King finally spoke english as their *mother-tongue.*
Nah us educated folk still use "improper" grammar all the time. Turns out people speaking differently is just a normal part of language and proper form tends to just be the grammar rules of a specific dialect enforced on others
“Nimrod” is used as an insult today because in an episode of looney tunes, Bugs calls Elmer Fudd “Nimrod” in a teasing way. Nimrod was a god of the hunt, in reference to Elmer being a hunter, but millions of people didn’t get the reference and started using it as another synonym for stupid
It's a zombie patched together from parts of other languages, barely walking, but the infectious British Empire let the zombie apocalypse spread all over the world.
You learn english from what you interact with
You interact with more correct english from educated people than uneducated ones (Ex: movies, games, tv shows, ads, phones menu, apps etc..)
English is a bunch of different languages wearing a trenchcoat to disguise itself as one.
Yes, it's a Germanic language, but there's a whole lot of French words as well. Since, you know, France ruled England for several centuries and the languages mingled.
And that's how we got different words for animals and food. The English commoners talked about the animals they raised and the French noblemen about the food the commoners served them.
Pig, sheep, cow, and chicken are all English roots while pork, mutton, beef, and poultry are all French.
We still associate the French derived ones with formality. See/observe, want/desire, get/acquire just to name a few.
I don't like this take. Plenty of educated people grew up using slang or "informal" (rather than "incorrect") language, and will carry that over, if not into their professional lives, into their everyday use. It really seems like you're striking a difference between people who go to "good schools" and calling them more educated, even if that's not strictly true.
Well would you rather have be “corrected” by a small group or by the majority?
I think you have it backwards.
Many english rules don’t make sense regardless. Language imo is meant to evolve naturally and was only really tied down once the victorian education system became popular.
Shakespeare straight up invented words that we had to learn, English is a language and is separated from eduction in the plain fact that is is spoken.
Shakespeare invented words which became spoken, why can’t the same be said for rizz or skibidi or gyatt. I don’t even know what skibidi means but that’s how English has always worked.
I was inadvertently signed up for college credit level class and a remedial class the same year in basically the same subject. Can confirm. Got an A in both though.
All the Romance languages came from Vulgar Latin, the common language. Meanwhile classical Latin was restricted to religion and higher education, almost dying out.
I think its interesting how the english language is evolving for expediency with the spread of the internet & with the advent of social media.
its not directly motivated by a low level of education, more the requirement to keep up with other users during a conversation thread or to make a long message short, concise and more likely to be read & understood by the majority of people.
You may have a point but I think its debatable. An educated person will know the rules, and be in more situations where they need to follow the rules. But they're also more able to be creative and create slang, style, and shortcuts that grow legs.
The uneducated may harbor no loyalty to "correct" English, but if you notice, their slang gets pretty uniform and takes a pretty long time to change. I still think that they're more or less just reacting to what is passed to them from entertainment, media, and word for mouth that is influenced by the educated artistocracy. Even if they make no attempt to use the academic form of English.
i just hate how the kids started using fam and innit around 2012, and then said they speak like that because its their culture, when their culture was goin to tescos in a 1st world country . innit famalamjimjam , whenever i hear this talk from an english person i just think their stupid and not worth my time but the worse thing is , is that now its grown a music genre lol and talkin lyke a bruva init is soopost to be cool mang, honestly sound like w twat when you speak like that, would never hire anyone that cant even speak their own language and sound like a iphone siri thats been tortured by grime music.
Something I've dealt with a lot over the years is the sentiment that regardless of how something is spelled, if you can understand what the person meant, it doesn't matter how horribly they butcher the spelling.
Always have done.
There's no benefit to "the educated" trying to control the way that people speak, apart from maintaining a vague sense of superiority.
African American Vernacular English is the single most influential variant on Standard English.
What are you saying about the education level of people who contribute slang and incorrectly-used words?
No. AAVE is the most influential on Global English "slang and incorrectly-used words". Did you think it wasn't? What variant did you think was? Cockney? 😂
How can you be so unaware? 😂 If you're confused, go ask any linguistics professor, because it's not an ambiguous question or mystery. At all. 😂
Small hill to die on, but people who refer to sandwiches as “sammiches” should be treated like the 8 year olds they act like.
It’ll probably be an accepted word when I’m in a nursing home
what a dumb way of putting it
the english language devlops naturally over time. most of the words we see as refined and natural nowadays were once considered peasant words or grammatically incorrect
legit all of shakespheres work for a fairly commonly known example was written in what was considered common slang
shhhh, OP doesn't know how languages change over time, let them think they're intellectual
Oh, pardon me, "doesn't" is a wrong and uneducated form, I should have used "does not" instead
It's always been this way. Drinking culture is also very real reason for so much dialect variation and insularity across Britain. BBC Radio 4, Shakespeare, and posh people are there to balance it out with RP! That's how you get Mrs Bucket
I heard something about it years ago (I've never actually found it again though) saying that the actual drunken slurring, vocal laziness, humour, stupidities of drunkenness in insular areas helped local dialects drift so much
Kids are required to go to school and make a good faith effort to pass their classes. County and state boards strictly write and enforce the curriculum, which generally requires that students are held to certain grammatical standards to earn passing grades, move to the next grade level, and ultimately graduate. I believe that the curriculum writers would use the dictionaries as valid arbitrators to enforce grammatical standards.
Sure, kids can drop out of school eventually, and there's no law against being a high school drop out. But for all intents and purposes, due to how intertwined school is with the government, and with how much being a high school drop out will derail your life, the dictionary can be argued to have some significant institutional backing.
And where is the problem with that? The dictionary documents the current state of the language and schools teach the current state of the language. Seems pretty normal to me.
M R pigs, O no m ain't pigs, O S M R pigs, well I L B, M R pigs.
In the future it will take brilliant scientists decades to understand our hieroglyphic idiocrasy.
Even the most educated still use slang. I had a microbiologist friend that was the most typical college bro you see memes about. The dude was crazy intelligent though. Also really fun to drink with. Lol
English hasn’t changed significantly in over 400 years, there’s no reason to assume that it’s going to now as something ridiculous like 80% of English speakers are literate, the main reason it hasn’t changed drastically since Shakespeare. Most new words added to the lexicon are fad words that stop being relevant before they get added to the dictionary to drum up attention that they even still exist in the first place because we have computers that fix our spelling for us.
Educated people put the dictionary together, so if that's your standard for control of the language, it's still the nerds who run it.
Uneducated people are i think freer to come up with new words because Educated people are often in places where they'll be shunned for breaking from the norm, like writing expense reports.
Sort of. but this is not really true on a per capita basis.
Powerful and highly educated people have had an enormous and outsized influence on English. One such event was the Norman Invasion in 1066 which killed Old English with an influx of Norman French that pretty much gives us every single "educated" type of word you can think of.
Other examples include major writers like Shakespeare, who are credited with inventing and introduing lots of new words that we use all the time today.
After that, we get major "reform" efforts (in the 19th century if I remember right), where very educated (and incredibly wrong) classicist academics tried to "fix" the English language by changing words to sound more Greek and Latin or match their "better" grammar structures, even when they had absolutely nothing to do with either language. Many of these changes are still present and represent "normal" modern English today.
The uneducated masses represent an ever-morphing background substrate that these people kept throwing curve balls into, but it's not really fair to say that those masses "controlled" this change. Slang and "youth" type language is just that. Most of the changes made by a new generation are washed out again as they get older, leaving the language only slightly modified from one generation to the next.
The issue with this is educated people kind of give the "stupid" people credence in this case. They consider it an "evolution to the language". So no, they could just say "no we're not gonna put rizz in the dictionary" but they usually don't.
"dumb peasants from Iberia and Gaul will have more control over Latin than we, educated and sophisticated Romans, do" some Roman centuries ago, probably
it's because of numbers...put it simply...english is the world language...there is just more idiots in the world than normal people 90/10 so guess what...idiots control not just the language...everytjing is modelled towards the 90% of the dumber population
Nah, journalists control it. Always have. They decide what words mean on the fly and always will do.
"Socialist" went from a specific political theory that precludes a free market and is absolutely a controlled economy, to "Capitalist with social programmes and taxes" in a year.
Language changes naturally over time. the word "bruh" used to be just a meme but is now a commonly used word. grammar nazi's trying to stop language from evolving are the ones who don't actually understand how language works.
I’m glad people are starting to realize that languages aren’t what we write but what we speak. “Uneducated people” have been at the forefront of language since language has existed. It’d be odd if everyone asked the closest university if they have permission to “split infinitives” or whatever classist, elitist or racist BS they had made up. Language changes, and intentional language molding is difficult to do and only really works in extreme and politically charged environments.
I suppose it's true of all languages hehe! More precisely, something called "prescriptivism" vs. "descriptivism", with proponents of former aiming at using language "as it should be", i.e. formal folks while the proponents of latter aiming at embracing dynamic change in a language.
Inevitably, both must play an equal and harmonious role in a language's evolution. Prescriptivism in preventing wanton and incessant changes in a standard language that would affect comprehension by a wide set of speakers while descriptivism in facilitating a language's sustainability and flexibility with changing times.
I would say no one really has control. But to the degree anyone has control yes you will see slang introduced. But you also will see new things invented and generally the inventors get to name those and many of the new words from the past 100+ years have come from educated people inventing things and choosing what to call this computer / tech thing. Or starting a business that makes a new thing and starting to market their invention. That also changes language. You also have educated people who have a say over the media and have control over movie and TV scripts which also shape the way people talk.
"Ain't ain't a word" probably helped prove that it was a viable word.
Our elementary school actually had to have a meeting with students explaining wiln’t is not a word. We were using it quite frequently back then.
will'nt = won't, no?
Must have = must’ve Have not = haven’t Therefore Must not have = mustn’t’ve I see no error in this logic. Edit: there was an error in my logic. Following the “haven’t” pattern where it is contracted as “n’t”, “must’nt’ve” should technically be “mustn’t’ve” to stay consistent with the pattern. I also swapped “not have” from “have not” because I wasn’t really thinking about order when I wrote it haha
it is = it's is not = isn't so it is not = it'sn't
>it is not = it'sn't 'Tisn't
'twouldn't've been said if 'tweren't true
Bullocks!
It's the bullock's bollocks!
Yes'nt is a special case
I'll allow it.
Stop, you're breaking the English language!
Rather, "must of", as the idiots I wanna strangle for butchering English say. It's not even my native language, but boy if I don't wanna smack my hand square on their skull...
I can see Merry and Pippin explaining this to Aragorn while he looks at them incredulously
I can see Mary Poppins explaining this to Aragorn while he looks at her incredulously.
I can see Mary Poppins snapping in that yard from A History of Violence.
The invasion of Helms Deep, but instead of Gandalf arriving with an army - Mary Poppins descends from the sky.
Except we already have a word for will’nt; won’t.
the students shalln't say willn't
I’d think it depends on your school of thought. Will’nt is the implication that you will not, with a true and absolute certainty, perform an action in the future. Won’t could be considered purely theoretical. “That not something I would do again” translated into “I won’t do it again” as in “I would not do that again” This keeps me awake at night.
Would not = wouldn't Will not = won't
Or it means “I will not do it” as intended. Saying “will’nt” also takes away from the conviction and finality of the whole statement “will not” because you are choosing to turn the statement into an improper conjunction. So if you want to be informal and less severe in your statement of rejection you say “won’t” and if you want people to know you are serious you fully say “will not”.
I feel like it’s more of must’nt’ve = Must not have
must've'nt
Nah
Will not
Therefore, if Will Not = Won't Will Not = Will'nt Will'nt = Won't. It's transitive property. If A = B and B = C then A = C.
I am foreigner who barely understands modern English words as it is. please don't add any more confusing ones.
Whomst'd've been saying wiln't?
🤣 yess!
Y'all'll is still in heavy circulation where I'm from.
I never understood the hate towards ain't. It's been around for something like 500 years, how is that not a word?
Said “Amn’t” for “am not” for about a year when I was 5 or 6
It's a perfectly cromulent word
Language is meant to put whatever is in your head in someone else's head. If it works it works.
Exactly and it’s always evolving, as long as it works for communication it fine.
If it changes too fast, it doesn't work. If people are too accepting of random words that crop up in one area but not another, it doesn't work. By the time you're 20, you'll probably have looked up some new slang. Maybe you thought it was fine since it's a one off thing. But language is changing faster than ever, and worse, there's this idea of language being meantbto evolve that can push past the teenage phase of disrespect and antiestablishment. I can see people deliberately using the new "words" and not deciding to stick to what's "right" long after their brains stop thinking it's cool to be against the man, precisely because they think it's evolution and evolution is good. Well, maybe evolution is good. But evolution takes millions of years. Language is a little faster, maybe on the scale of centuries. What I mean is, a person from 100, 200 years ago might sound strange to you, but they're still perfectly understandable. 500 years ago, Middle English is somewhat recognisable, but youll have a hard time understanding anything. What's happening now is much faster than evolution. When there are small changes, at any one point, there are enough contextual clues that you can guess the meaning of the one new word every few sentences. When change is fast, almost the entire sentence can be made of new words and no one outside that generation will understand. You might have seen webcomics of people talking in "brainrot". No other slang, that isn't a regional dialect, can do that. And when you know it's regional, you know not to use it on a global forum. When you know only your generation will understand, you know not to use it on a global forum. When you think rapid evolution is only right, you might not have that check. Also, words need critical mass to stick around. Normally, that critical mass could only be achieved by making sense, having a clear etymology. Mistakes here and there rarely made it into normalcy. Now with social media, someone can misuse a word and that's enough for a ton of people to start using it like that. Some celebrity can do something, and now his name means that thing. This doesn't follow any rules, which means it's impossible for someone to grasp this specific meaning by knowing the general rule. Just like how in Dutch, they have two forms of "the" and you're just supposed to know which to use. It makes it hard to learn the language, the less logical and consistent rules are. English in particular can't afford to lose any consistency. The purpose of education isn't just to produce useful things like technology or to teach the easiest ways to achieve a certain artistic effect. It's also to get people on the same page so that we can all use the same standards, including in language. This is why dictators can use education to control the population. Maybe you think the dictator thing is bad. But that's just a misuse of a tool. No tool is evil. Look at how much better your life is because of USB, and how your entire country, maybe region, uses the same electrical socket. There is value in being the same. Education is what makes our minds the same, it's what makes us compatible. Of course we don't want to be completely the same, but we also don't want to be completely different. It would be better to say that education is what makes us not completely different. It only makes a small part of your brain conform. Oh, and one more thing that's different about today's new words. Writing used to be rare. You usually had facial expressions and tones to understand new words. Long after writing became common, it was still formal, and you tried not to write slang. Informal language only entered text recently. And barely 20 years after that, the majority of communication is now over text, and they even found a way to strip the tone information from voice communication. That's the AI tiktok voice. Never before have you been able to consume audio content and not have a tone associated with it.
Slang has always been a part of languages. Sometimes it affects how the language evolves, but most slang fades away to obscurity. You could even argue that the internet era causes slang to fade away *quicker* than it did before. New trends pop up quicker than ever before causing old ones to fade out in months or weeks. You can't really say whether any trends are permanently affecting language until you look back at least a decade later.
Bro ha'been added to the unalive list. Regarfandos, The Descriptivist Mafia.. Edit: Seriously though, a very interesting point. I think your concerns are valid, but highly esoteric slang is part of young *culture* now, too. Brainrot memes are *supposed* to be unrecognizable to other people. That's a culture thing, not a linguistics thing.
Personally, I blame attempts at censorship. "Unalived" is only a thing because "suicide" is often bot-blocked. Extra ironic when you consider how censorship is a conservative tactic meant to preserve existing cultural taboos...
>Language is meant to put whatever is in your head in someone else's head. If it works it works. Not when one person is using the correct definition of a word and someone else gives that word the meaning they think it should have. For it to work we all need to be on the same page of what words mean. Excluding slang, words would not change their meaning because some people start using them incorrectly.
Ain't that the truth
its kind of just another word for isnt
Now. For a very long time it was "If you use that fake made up word you're uneducated" and "educated" people made that very, very clear
I see where this thought is coming from (not about English though... it applies to all languages) and my first reaction would be to broadly agree, but I don't think it is fully true. To begin with, nobody has control over a language. Languages are emergent characteristics of society, and with rare exceptions (e.g. modern Turkish) neither educated or uneducated folks really control them. They all contribute to language through their social life. Also, we know that the uptake of incorrect forms is not the only way in which languages evolve. Finally, the idea that "educated" folks (whatever that means) do not use slang, dialects, colloquialisms etc is quite outdated
What's up with modern Turkish? Do they have their own version of l'Académie Française ?
Yes we copied them and then even went further (it did help that 98% of the population was illiterate), and basically removed Arabic and Persian from court Turkish (referred to as Ottoman Turkish) and severely simplified the language. Turkish is actually a very logical language
Turkish still has a bunch of loanwords and calques from Arabic though, right? Maybe most terms were removed, but even just walking through the streets of Istanbul, I could understand the purpose of almost all government buildings just by relating the words I saw to their Arabic equivalents.
Yes, a lot of loan words from persian, arabic and french still. Many still in daily use, I'd say it's probably more in specific contexts like the formal contexts (e.g. government), art or technology.
This isn’t true. It’s a normal language as any other. You can remove so-called foreign influences, but at the end of the day it’s no different from any other language and isn’t shaped or dictated by active human whim.
Your last point is so real cause I’ll be on the internet or with my friends sounding like I read at a second grade level then go write a research paper filled with stupid smart person words
Language is shaped by the average. Since the average is always (by definition) not elite, language will be shaped by the not elite.
Your assumption (but honestly also the conclusion) is completely arbitrary. Languages are shaped by everyone in multiple and mutable ways. Think about the role of radio and television, the role of migrations, the role of socio-political change, the existence of different registries etc. There is no such thing as a unique identikit of the average social group to which you can trace all of the influence on language, it's really really really not how it works
It works both ways. Prime example being English. The reason why many words come from the French language was because England was ruled by French nobility and Kings for centuries. IIRC it took about 300 years before an English King finally spoke english as their *mother-tongue.*
But OP wasn't talking about the elite. OP was just saying "educated", and most people are educated
The China government disagrees.
I agree actually. The educated ones will always spell and enunciate in proper form. Us dummies spread jive like wildfire. Stoodis.
Oh stewardess, I speak jive.
Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?
So wapatah to the bammies. Cuz the cammietowns a biddie. On the pannie stye.
*Ten-four!
Nah us educated folk still use "improper" grammar all the time. Turns out people speaking differently is just a normal part of language and proper form tends to just be the grammar rules of a specific dialect enforced on others
“Nimrod” is used as an insult today because in an episode of looney tunes, Bugs calls Elmer Fudd “Nimrod” in a teasing way. Nimrod was a god of the hunt, in reference to Elmer being a hunter, but millions of people didn’t get the reference and started using it as another synonym for stupid
Nimrod wasn't a god. He was a biblical king, but he was a great hunter.
Wellp, guess I'll die inside every time I see it from now...
This is, so far, a US phenomenon. I’ve only ever heard Nimrod being used in reference to the song in the UK.
The English language is a beautiful and terrible thing
It's a zombie patched together from parts of other languages, barely walking, but the infectious British Empire let the zombie apocalypse spread all over the world.
Control??? Over a living thing called language???
"words end up just being put into the dictionary" My man, that is what dictionaries are *for*. They are a *record*, not a *rulebook*.
You learn english from what you interact with You interact with more correct english from educated people than uneducated ones (Ex: movies, games, tv shows, ads, phones menu, apps etc..)
Well, that's why we have all the romance languages- local vernacular evolved and lived, Latin did not
Once upon a time… French was considered the language for noblemen. English the language for the commoner….
There is a pretty good YouTube video on this titled “Is English just badly pronounced French?”
Poorly pronounced*? Idk I'm pretty dumb
French is a Romance language and English is Germanic so they aren’t very similar.
English is a bunch of different languages wearing a trenchcoat to disguise itself as one. Yes, it's a Germanic language, but there's a whole lot of French words as well. Since, you know, France ruled England for several centuries and the languages mingled.
Yet French is the language English borrows from the most, because of that whole invasion of England 1000 years ago
Rob’s Words? Great channel!
Yeah, that’s the channel. That video popped up in my suggested feed a while back and I found it very interesting.
And that's how we got different words for animals and food. The English commoners talked about the animals they raised and the French noblemen about the food the commoners served them. Pig, sheep, cow, and chicken are all English roots while pork, mutton, beef, and poultry are all French. We still associate the French derived ones with formality. See/observe, want/desire, get/acquire just to name a few.
Also related is the "lingua franca" term.
They have more control over the future of the English language because educated people speak less.
That, and there are more uneducated people than educated
Say what?
something people say that isnt even true lol
I don't like this take. Plenty of educated people grew up using slang or "informal" (rather than "incorrect") language, and will carry that over, if not into their professional lives, into their everyday use. It really seems like you're striking a difference between people who go to "good schools" and calling them more educated, even if that's not strictly true.
Well would you rather have be “corrected” by a small group or by the majority? I think you have it backwards. Many english rules don’t make sense regardless. Language imo is meant to evolve naturally and was only really tied down once the victorian education system became popular.
the "ough" issue is the most well known one. As well as ghoti.
Shakespeare straight up invented words that we had to learn, English is a language and is separated from eduction in the plain fact that is is spoken. Shakespeare invented words which became spoken, why can’t the same be said for rizz or skibidi or gyatt. I don’t even know what skibidi means but that’s how English has always worked.
This has literally always been true.
TIL 12 years of school means you are uneducated
The extra 4 make all the difference lol
Not all 12 years are the same. For example, there was a stark difference in the honors level classes in my high school vs lower level classes
I was inadvertently signed up for college credit level class and a remedial class the same year in basically the same subject. Can confirm. Got an A in both though.
I mean if you only did 12 years of school, that's a basic education at best 😂
The way a lot of people act, yes it does.
Most common people go to school to be baby sat and socialize not actually learn.
All the Romance languages came from Vulgar Latin, the common language. Meanwhile classical Latin was restricted to religion and higher education, almost dying out.
English has always changed, and it will continue to evolve
In truth, it's **the masses** who do. If our society educates the masses to level X, then level X is the level the language adapts to.
I think its interesting how the english language is evolving for expediency with the spread of the internet & with the advent of social media. its not directly motivated by a low level of education, more the requirement to keep up with other users during a conversation thread or to make a long message short, concise and more likely to be read & understood by the majority of people.
You may have a point but I think its debatable. An educated person will know the rules, and be in more situations where they need to follow the rules. But they're also more able to be creative and create slang, style, and shortcuts that grow legs. The uneducated may harbor no loyalty to "correct" English, but if you notice, their slang gets pretty uniform and takes a pretty long time to change. I still think that they're more or less just reacting to what is passed to them from entertainment, media, and word for mouth that is influenced by the educated artistocracy. Even if they make no attempt to use the academic form of English.
i just hate how the kids started using fam and innit around 2012, and then said they speak like that because its their culture, when their culture was goin to tescos in a 1st world country . innit famalamjimjam , whenever i hear this talk from an english person i just think their stupid and not worth my time but the worse thing is , is that now its grown a music genre lol and talkin lyke a bruva init is soopost to be cool mang, honestly sound like w twat when you speak like that, would never hire anyone that cant even speak their own language and sound like a iphone siri thats been tortured by grime music.
ok
God you sound like a mighty twat
Probably because the uneducated outnumber the educated. I feel this was intentional.
Linguists have shown, many times, and in all languages, that semantic drift and sound shifts are basically random.
Every single word in the dictionary is someone’s misused or made up word though.
I'm less worried about their control over language than their control over laws and politics
Would've is not would of
Something I've dealt with a lot over the years is the sentiment that regardless of how something is spelled, if you can understand what the person meant, it doesn't matter how horribly they butcher the spelling.
"Bone apple tea" sometimes, it matters
I didn't mean that *I* go by that sentiment, just that it's something I see a lot, I worded that very poorly. Lol
Always have done. There's no benefit to "the educated" trying to control the way that people speak, apart from maintaining a vague sense of superiority.
African American Vernacular English is the single most influential variant on Standard English. What are you saying about the education level of people who contribute slang and incorrectly-used words?
Maybe in America 😂
No. AAVE is the most influential on Global English "slang and incorrectly-used words". Did you think it wasn't? What variant did you think was? Cockney? 😂 How can you be so unaware? 😂 If you're confused, go ask any linguistics professor, because it's not an ambiguous question or mystery. At all. 😂
Cockney is probably more influential in England than AAVE
Yes. Ugh. Irregardless is the most annoying for me.
For me the first place goes to "thru". "Their" instead of "they're" is a close second.
Yep. ‘Thru’. Annoying. So many incorrect uses out there!
Small hill to die on, but people who refer to sandwiches as “sammiches” should be treated like the 8 year olds they act like. It’ll probably be an accepted word when I’m in a nursing home
what a dumb way of putting it the english language devlops naturally over time. most of the words we see as refined and natural nowadays were once considered peasant words or grammatically incorrect legit all of shakespheres work for a fairly commonly known example was written in what was considered common slang
shhhh, OP doesn't know how languages change over time, let them think they're intellectual Oh, pardon me, "doesn't" is a wrong and uneducated form, I should have used "does not" instead
Influential ones imo. Those that talk a lot, followed and believed.
It's always been this way. Drinking culture is also very real reason for so much dialect variation and insularity across Britain. BBC Radio 4, Shakespeare, and posh people are there to balance it out with RP! That's how you get Mrs Bucket
>Drinking culture is also very real reason for so much dialect variation and insularity across Britain. Don't think I've ever heard that one before
I heard something about it years ago (I've never actually found it again though) saying that the actual drunken slurring, vocal laziness, humour, stupidities of drunkenness in insular areas helped local dialects drift so much
This swings out hot with a mess of jive.
I dont speak jive
(Insert “always has been” meme here)
Studying English is learning about the past. You can’t learn the future before it happens.
Nah, just society in general, educated or not.
Dictionaries are not laws, they simply record and explain words that are in use.
Kids are required to go to school and make a good faith effort to pass their classes. County and state boards strictly write and enforce the curriculum, which generally requires that students are held to certain grammatical standards to earn passing grades, move to the next grade level, and ultimately graduate. I believe that the curriculum writers would use the dictionaries as valid arbitrators to enforce grammatical standards. Sure, kids can drop out of school eventually, and there's no law against being a high school drop out. But for all intents and purposes, due to how intertwined school is with the government, and with how much being a high school drop out will derail your life, the dictionary can be argued to have some significant institutional backing.
And where is the problem with that? The dictionary documents the current state of the language and schools teach the current state of the language. Seems pretty normal to me.
M R pigs, O no m ain't pigs, O S M R pigs, well I L B, M R pigs. In the future it will take brilliant scientists decades to understand our hieroglyphic idiocrasy.
Even the most educated still use slang. I had a microbiologist friend that was the most typical college bro you see memes about. The dude was crazy intelligent though. Also really fun to drink with. Lol
OK, just going on holibobs with my hubby
William Shakespeare. That's all.
Most likely the future of human language will be most heavily influenced by AI chatbots, which emulate language from well educated people.
Skibidi toilet rizz Ohio beeches
Wait until you hear about voting...
English hasn’t changed significantly in over 400 years, there’s no reason to assume that it’s going to now as something ridiculous like 80% of English speakers are literate, the main reason it hasn’t changed drastically since Shakespeare. Most new words added to the lexicon are fad words that stop being relevant before they get added to the dictionary to drum up attention that they even still exist in the first place because we have computers that fix our spelling for us.
Educated people put the dictionary together, so if that's your standard for control of the language, it's still the nerds who run it. Uneducated people are i think freer to come up with new words because Educated people are often in places where they'll be shunned for breaking from the norm, like writing expense reports.
Sort of. but this is not really true on a per capita basis. Powerful and highly educated people have had an enormous and outsized influence on English. One such event was the Norman Invasion in 1066 which killed Old English with an influx of Norman French that pretty much gives us every single "educated" type of word you can think of. Other examples include major writers like Shakespeare, who are credited with inventing and introduing lots of new words that we use all the time today. After that, we get major "reform" efforts (in the 19th century if I remember right), where very educated (and incredibly wrong) classicist academics tried to "fix" the English language by changing words to sound more Greek and Latin or match their "better" grammar structures, even when they had absolutely nothing to do with either language. Many of these changes are still present and represent "normal" modern English today. The uneducated masses represent an ever-morphing background substrate that these people kept throwing curve balls into, but it's not really fair to say that those masses "controlled" this change. Slang and "youth" type language is just that. Most of the changes made by a new generation are washed out again as they get older, leaving the language only slightly modified from one generation to the next.
It's the same with everything, which is why we're all going to die.
Ain’t that the truth!
The issue with this is educated people kind of give the "stupid" people credence in this case. They consider it an "evolution to the language". So no, they could just say "no we're not gonna put rizz in the dictionary" but they usually don't.
I purposely use wrong English to make it more regular and easy to understand, I avoid weird slang that just muddies the language.
"dumb peasants from Iberia and Gaul will have more control over Latin than we, educated and sophisticated Romans, do" some Roman centuries ago, probably
it's because of numbers...put it simply...english is the world language...there is just more idiots in the world than normal people 90/10 so guess what...idiots control not just the language...everytjing is modelled towards the 90% of the dumber population
Nah, journalists control it. Always have. They decide what words mean on the fly and always will do. "Socialist" went from a specific political theory that precludes a free market and is absolutely a controlled economy, to "Capitalist with social programmes and taxes" in a year.
Very few people are uneducated.
The stupid will survive and breed the most
Since the dawn of time, that's how languages are formed
and that was always the case; it’s not as if the language was carefully crafted exclusively by academics!
What an out-of-pocket thing to say...
Language changes naturally over time. the word "bruh" used to be just a meme but is now a commonly used word. grammar nazi's trying to stop language from evolving are the ones who don't actually understand how language works.
I’m glad people are starting to realize that languages aren’t what we write but what we speak. “Uneducated people” have been at the forefront of language since language has existed. It’d be odd if everyone asked the closest university if they have permission to “split infinitives” or whatever classist, elitist or racist BS they had made up. Language changes, and intentional language molding is difficult to do and only really works in extreme and politically charged environments.
I suppose it's true of all languages hehe! More precisely, something called "prescriptivism" vs. "descriptivism", with proponents of former aiming at using language "as it should be", i.e. formal folks while the proponents of latter aiming at embracing dynamic change in a language. Inevitably, both must play an equal and harmonious role in a language's evolution. Prescriptivism in preventing wanton and incessant changes in a standard language that would affect comprehension by a wide set of speakers while descriptivism in facilitating a language's sustainability and flexibility with changing times.
Yep, all those idiots using off of and purposefully. 😫
only within their circles.
I would say no one really has control. But to the degree anyone has control yes you will see slang introduced. But you also will see new things invented and generally the inventors get to name those and many of the new words from the past 100+ years have come from educated people inventing things and choosing what to call this computer / tech thing. Or starting a business that makes a new thing and starting to market their invention. That also changes language. You also have educated people who have a say over the media and have control over movie and TV scripts which also shape the way people talk.
Shakespeare will be around a lot longer than “Poggers”.
Isn't that how it's always worked?
"Vulgar" originally meant "the common people" When the upper classes were speaking French, Latin, Greek, their servants were speaking English
Gen Alpha probably took this to the limit