General Chat

Hee hee. You see, *my* sign is relevant -- Virgo is the sign of nitpicking pedants. ;)

I am with you drives me mad (is it my age ?)

yes I see your point, but their comments were oh so small compared with volumes on the subject with the threat of maybe more :-)

*Watch out Virgo, you're next!!*

Very nice Aunty wotsit, but what has star signs got to do with the thread heading?. Perhaps another thread of your own with the heading STAR SIGNS would be more appropriate.

A pedant?.....me?....never!. and stop trying ter spoil me moan Uggers

Well done Eileen, I knew someone would :-)))

I still say they can keep it :-)

Janey... Sagittarian? me?


LOL of course I am!

xx

Dermot: "Censorship of a language is an excuse to prevent a 'perceived' hurt."

My guess is that someone is whining about inclusive language, and someone is trying to drag "PC" into this discussion ...

Rose, how soon we forget. ;)

A Virgo, of course!

Oh - and today is No.1's birthday. A pointless Gemini. At least he's as old as I am now.


I never did figure it out -- I guessed you as a Sagittarius. How far off was I??

Eileen -- exactly as I suspected!

Another interesting feature retained in some parts of the US is the distinction between words like

cot & caught

I pronounce them exactly alike, in Canadian English, but a true New Yawker would pronounce them very differently -- "cot" at the front of the mouth, and "caught" farther back.

"Gotten would appear to mean 'obtain' not to mean 'have'." -- is the distinction mentioned earlier in the thread, wasn't it?

Ha!! Eileen had bested you all. Well done, Eileen:))

In Winchester there is a very old building called 'God Begot House' it means 'Goods be Gotten Here'. i.e. it was a form of market or shop. Gotten would appear to mean 'obtain' not to mean 'have'.
Gotten is the Middle English word that was taken to America by the early settlers. They have kept it in the language whereas we have let it drop. Therefore the word is more authentically English, and perhaps we should have kept it.
Sorry for the pedanticity -probably no such word - but my husband is a retired English teacher, he reads Anglo Saxon, and is very good on the origin of words.

lol Janey and Uggers...so while I am giving this matter the intense concentration it deserves ;) what about the phrase ( am I imagining this?! ) " Given the get go" ...I am sure I have heard that ( probably from my mum lol)

xx

( btw I knew Uggers was Aquarian :) but what are you Janey? )

"Censorship of a language is an excuse to prevent a 'perceived' hurt."

Anybody able to explain this statement?

:))

Well yes, but you're an Aquarius, and you would say that!

I never is.

Misbegotten illiterate. ;)

All you pedants make me want to use worse grammar than I do already:)

Nothing wrong with gotten. Stop moaning:)))

btw, I quite like the word "get".

When I write government English, I often make a point of saying things like "you must get a licence" rather than "you must obtain a licence".

"Get" is a nice, basic English word, not tarted up with pretentious Latin.

My Oxford Concise says:

Middle English from Old Norse "geta" (obtain, beget, guess), corresponding to Old English "gietan" (recorded only in compounds), from Germanic.

Oh no! "Gietan"???

Rose ... believe it or not ...

I have a neighbour named ECSETERA. (I'm not actually sure how it's spelled, but it's pronounced Exetera.)

Her full name (without revealing her surname):

Liberty Ecsetera Smith.

I guess she could sign it L. Etc. Smith, to avoid the embarassment of the illiterate spelling.

Quite taken with herself, she is. A couple of years ago she treated me to a long discourse about how she really didn't belong on this crappy little street of ours, her family had money, but her father gambled it all away.

Also, of course, her mother is a loon who never worked a day until Ecsetera became too old for her to get benefits, at which point she took a request that her ride not lean on the car horn to pick her up for work at 8 o'clock Saturday morning as an opportunity to wax all self-righteous about how some people in the world have jobs ...