MagiStream

Since religion and other volatile topics are permitted here, it should be perfectly fine to speak about a language and its uses, as well as misuses.

Everyone who has graduated high school should be well aware of everything that is said below, so it should be nothing more than a nice refresher. Everyone who ignored their English classes, on the other hand, should come out of this with a new or fresh understanding of how the English language works.

We'll start simple, with the exact sentence that my own English teacher used back in the day:

"Let's eat grandma"

In this sentence, you are saying to eat the grandmother. That wouldn't be very nice to the grandmother, now would it? Let's add a little something.

"Let's eat, grandma"

Now, instead of saying to eat the grandmother, you're talking to the grandmother and saying to eat togather. The meaning of the very same sentence was entirely changed with nothing but a small comma added.

That's quite the drastic difference for one little comma. The difference can be the same, or even larger, when a word or words are added to a sentence. Let's take a look at a pair of sentences that tend to be treated exactly the same even though they are very different:

Sentence 1
"You're an idiot"

Sentence 2
"You're acting like an idiot"

Now, in the first sentence, you are clearly saying that the person you're speaking to is of lesser intelligence. However, in the second sentence, you are telling the person you're speaking to to not behave in a way that a person of lesser intelligence would behave. The key difference here is that the word "acting" is used in sentence two. That word is used to refer to a behavior that is not true of the person. Let's delve a little deeper into this word, shall we?

"He's acting the fool"

This can be seen in a few different ways, depending on context. For now, let's assume that you're saying this while watching a play. You are speaking about the person who is playing the role of the fool on stage. The person is acting silly, as his role requires.
Now let's change the context to something more familiar. This time, you're in a classroom. The sentence would be taken as saying that someone is acting like a fool, which is usually done in order to gain the attention of other children or teenagers.
Changing the sentence a little, let's see what the new meaning becomes:

"He's acting like a fool"

This wording is much more common for a classroom setting, no? However, the meaning of the sentence has stayed the same. You are saying that someone is acting, or behaving, like a fool. This means that the person in question is behaving foolishly. Let's alter the wording a little more:

"He's such a fool"

Now, you are saying that the person you're talking about is unwise. The one simple word, "acting," made a large impact on the meaning of the sentence.

Let's change things up a bit.

Some words have various meanings, all entirely different. One such word is "spirit." It can be used in many different ways, though you'll likely only hear two of the meanings without delving deeper into the word. Three of the meanings are or relate to soul, emotion and alcohol.

Since we're talking about language, let's focus on the second of the meanings listed. The most common usage is found when speaking of sports while watching them perform.

"Those girls have so much spirit!"

For this sentence, let's say that you're watching a group of cheerleaders. By stating that they have a lot of spirit, you are saying that they are vigorous and lively in their cheers. By replacing "Those girls" with "They," you could be talking about a football team, or any other sports team, that's playing strong. Even if the team is losing the match, they can be showing spirit by not giving up.

Now let's apply the same word in another way:

"His spirits are low"

What this sentence means is that the person you're talking about is not feeling very well. Not that they are ill in some way, but that they are emotionally spent. Having low spirits tends to mean that someone is going through a difficult time and just doesn't want to put any effort or energy into anything.

Another way to apply this word is as such:

"In the spirit of-"

Countless words can come after "of" for this sentence. The most common sentence you'll see this application of the word "spirit" is "In the spirit of Christmas" in almost all Christmas movies. In those movies, Christmas is all about sharing and spreading love and kindness. So really, when you hear "the spirit of Christmas," you are hearing "the spirit of love and kindness." What this means is that being kind and loving is encouraged. However, because "Christmas" is the word used in the sentence, this application for "spirit" tends to only be valid during the winter holiday.

"In the spirit of kindness"

By replacing the word "Christmas" with "kindness," we are now talking about acts of good will. Donating money to an animal shelter, giving food to a homeless person, giving a poor child a new toy, or complimenting someone are all acts of kindness. There are countless ways to show kindness. The use of the word "spirit" when applied in such a way is to embody the meaning of a word.

If a word has no emotion tied to it, "spirit" is not able to be properly used. Let's look at an example of this:

"The spirit of the instructions"

Now, "instructions" are not things that have emotions tied to them. Let's say that you're in math class for this example. Your teacher has instructed you to calculate the area of a triangle. Let's say that you complete your calculations faster than the rest of the class and begin doodling on your paper to pass the time; Because you're doodling instead of doing more calulations, your teacher tells you that you're ignoring the spirit of the instructions. Doesn't make much sense, right?

Let's change the sentence a little to make this sentence work:

"The spirit of learning"

Using the same math class example as above, your teacher walks up on you doodling and says that you're ignoring the spirit of learning. In this sense, "spirit" implies the will to learn. The will to learn is an eagerness to improve, with eagerness being the key emotion. By ignoring the spirit of learning, you are ignoring your ability to get better than you already are and are instead focusing on something else entirely.

There are many words that get misued in the English language. Listing all of them would likely take days or even weeks, so I'll keep this simple.

The most common word to get misused, from my own experience, is "a lot." Countless people use "alot" when they are talking about there being many of something. However, "alot" is not a word. Without the space between "a" and "lot" the word is supposed to be "allot" which is used when giving something for a specific purpose. Let's view a couple examples:

"There are a lot of balloons"

This sentence is saying that there are numberous, or many, balloons.

"Each farmer was alloted an acre of land."

What this sentence means is that each farmer was given an acre of land.


With the world becoming more and more virtual, with less people interacting in person, the English language is becoming more misused by the day. Personally, I find this disappointing and discouraging, since the language is capable of so much when used properly.

How do you view the English language and how it is used, as well as misused?

Another one is the misuse of 'less' and 'fewer'. 'Less' should only be used when the thing you are talking about is divisible - ie you can cut it up into smaller parts. So:

"I would like less cake" = I don't want as big a slice of the cake as you are trying to cut for me.

But if what you are talking about can't (or shouldn't!) be cut down into smaller bits - needs to remain a whole - 'fewer' is the word to use:

"There are fewer cars on the road today" = there aren't as many cars as there were previously. It isn't 'less cars' because you mean whole numbers of cars.

or "... with fewer people interacting in person..."


One of my favourite instances of garbled English was some years ago in the (British) supermarket Sainsbury's. They had the chef Jamie Oliver (not always known for his correct English) as their poster boy, and had big banners up in the shop suggesting interesting combinations of food. Most of them were fine, but one of them had me in stitches every time I went in the shop:

"Try slicing pears with a piece of stilton cheese."

I'm a linguistics and English language student and one of the first things they teach you is "descriptive not prescriptive". 'Grammar rules', especially in writing, are much more arbitrary than they might seem, and written English language is actually very dissimilar to spoken English language.

Take spelling for instance.

I ate alot of ice cream today.

Even though the spelling of "a lot" is presciptively incorrect, the meaning of the sentence is still very clear. As an English speaker, virtually nobody would assume the writer meant "allot" rather than "a lot", because in the grammatical rules of the English language, it is awkward for a verb to follow another verb like that, and it's more grammatically consistent for "alot" to be related to "ice cream", because we know instinctively that you have to eat an object, such as "an allotment" or "a lot of ice cream". Notice that I did not put grammar rules in quotes here, and I'll explain that later.
Standardized spelling in English is actually a fairly recent development, mostly coming about after the widespread use of the printing press. For example, here are some attested spellings of "sword" before standardization:

sweord, sueord, swurd, suord, swyrd, suerd, swerd, swærd, swuerd, swerde, sworde, surd, squorde, zuord, swerid, swert, sward, swirde, swhirde, squrd, sqwerd, swearde, swyrde, swurde, shorde, showrde, swourd, swoorde, swrd, sourd, sword

And in fact, in many cultures, especially those with large ESL communities, spelling can be extraordinarily varied and is actually more reflective of how you would communicate it verbally.

Continuing on, we have what's called 'spontaneous speech'. The vast majority of the talking you do isn't reading off of a paper, but unconscious, fluid speech, which is really pretty disordered compared to how we write. Even when transcribing speech, we tend to omit backpedaling, corrections, filler words, backchanneling, and a whole lot of other sounds. We even add in things that weren't really there, like periods and commas. Let's take the ice cream example again:

I ate a lot of ice cream today when we went to the beach. The weather was so sunny and we saw birds, seashells, even some fish.

If you read it aloud to yourself just as it's written here, adhering to every pause and comma, your conversation partner would rightfully be suspicious that you didn't actually eat ice cream and go to be beach, because it wouldn't sound like spontaneous speech. Instead, you'd probably say something like this:

i ate a loooooooot of ice cream today when we went to the beach ugh the weather was sooo sunny we saw birds she- seashells even some fish

Of course, this is also glossing over the fact that many of the words you said would also bleed into one another, making them sound completely different than what you'd expect on paper. Depending on your accent or dialect, you might have also missed the /r/ in 'birds' or 'et' instead of something like 'ait'. But none of those changes would have affected your understanding of what the speaker said.
What is the point here? The fact that

I ate a lot of ice cream today.

and

I ate allot of ice cream today.

and

I ate alot of ice cream today.

would all sound exactly the same in spontaneous speech anyway.

Remember when I said 'grammar rules' and grammar rules? 'Grammar rules' are prescriptivist uses of language, particularly in writing, but grammar rules are the inherent rules that make the language make sense and convey meaning.
Let's take this for example:

The spirit of the instructions

We have a determiner, 'the' which precedes a noun. So far so good. A preposition. Also good. Another determiner and a noun. All perfectly grammatical and valid. Suppose I had said something like "Did you understand the spirit of the instructions?" I don't think anybody would have any trouble understanding what I meant. Same as "the belle of the ball" and "the revelry of the chandeliers". Technically that last one doesn't have any meaningful literal sense, but you can sort of understand what it's going for or ascribe some metaphorical sense to it. Watch what happens if we do this:

of instructions spirit The the

Now that makes no grammatical English sense. Maybe "of instructions" can conceivably mean something, but "spirit The the" doesn't mean anything, because two determiners following a noun has no grammatical sense.

This discussion all really comes down to what the purpose of language is. If you consider it to be the conveyance of meaning, any sort of 'grammatical', 'spelling', or 'punctuation' 'error' is really meaningless as long as you understood what the person meant.

This is certainly a very interesting thread. I happen to absolutely love the English language, so watching other people, especially people who actually know what they're talking about, discuss the intricacies of its grammar is always fun. Anyway, I want to add something to the discussion, so I'll throw in the thing that I've personally seen most often in everyday conversation. It's double negatives!

I don't know how many languages actually have these (I know for certain that Spanish doesn't), but they are incredibly confusing. My friends mess them up around me all the time, and even though I'm always on the lookout for it when I'm talking I've still managed to slip up a few times. I've also heard them in several of the songs that I listen to which leads to me skipping entire lines, since I know that isn't what they meant to say.

I almost wish our language was like Spanish and we didn't have double negatives. Then we could just but two negative words in one sentence and have it still just mean no. That would be great. Unfortunately, that's not the case, and I'll have to deal with double negatives in songs and day to day speech forever.

As for your comments on less and fewer, I never knew the difference between those two words before, so that was really cool to learn. I just looked it up to check, and that is basically the difference. Thanks for that.

I would also agree that it doesn't really matter if the grammar is perfect as long as it's understandable (and your a Linguistics and English language student, so who am I to talk?), but that doesn't mean I can't like nice, pretty grammar. Of course, I say that, and you're probably going to be able to find so many mistakes in this reply... Oh well...

BlueOrchid wrote:
I almost wish our language was like Spanish and we didn't have double negatives.

I had to read your post twice to understand what you meant, which I think shows just how crazy English can be sometimes. At first I was thinking, "of course Spanish has double negatives!" Now I see that you meant that having a double negative in Spanish keeps things negative, whereas in English two negatives will negate each other, no longer making the sentence's meaning negative. ("I don't not like it", for example, meaning that you don't dislike something). Hopefully that's not too confusing, haha.

Anyway, this mention of double negatives made me want to add something to the discussion. (And the fact that I am a huge language nerd and studying English.) I was reminded how older forms of English had what is called a "four-form system" of affirmation/negation words: "yes", "no", "yea", and "nay". Nowadays we have a two-form system and say "yes" and "no" in response to questions, but this can sometimes cause confusion.

For example, someone may casually ask, "You won't go?" Here if someone responds with "yes", that might confuse the asker. Yes, the reply is confirming that they won't go? Or yes, the reply is saying that the asker is correct? This is where the four-form system of yes and no that older versions of English had can be useful. Here is an example, quoted from Wikipedia. (Admittedly not the best source but it explains the gist of it pretty well.)

While Modern English has a two-form system of yes and no for affirmatives and negatives, earlier forms of English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it.

Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
Will they not go? — No, they will not.
Will they go? — Yea, they will.
Will they go? — Nay, they will not.

Anyway, this is just what I thought of when double negatives were brought up. I think it's interesting that we've moved away from such a system and instead use words like "correct" when we want to be clear about something. I'm not always the best at explaining, so here is a link to the article, if you're interested. It also talks about three-form systems and gives an overview of how affirmation and negation manifest in languages other than English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no

It was really fascinating reading through all of the replies so far! English is such an intricate and interesting language. I have such an admiration for those who speak it as a second language, as it is certainly very confusing at times!

Do I get to complain about people using the wrong you're/r?!?!?! Oh my goodness YAY!
(I will admit right now that I'm probably going to make a grammatical mistake here or there. There may also be a word or three in Spanish since my Swype keyboard language is set to both Spanish and English.)

I'm a fairly avid reader of fanfiction, and you would be amazed at how many people use 'your' instead of 'you're' and vice versa(sometimes they switch between the two). I don't quite understand what the misunderstanding there is. 'You're' and 'your' are only similar audibly and when talking about the subject.
'You're' is a contraction of 'you' and 'are'. In a sentence that reads something along the lines of, say, 'you put you're book down', undoing this contraction would result in the sentence reading 'you put you are book down,' which sounds like you started to say 'you put your book down' and tried to change it to 'you are the book' halfway through, failing miserably.
Also, 'you're' is a descriptor, telling the reader that, oh, yeah, okay, this character/person is doing something in the present tense. It can also tell the reader, when a speaker is giving instructions to be carried out in the future, that the character/person will be doing something.
('You're going to do ----.' You're jumping up and down. The book is yours. 'The knife has your bloody fingerprints on it, therefore, you're the perpetrator of this crime.')
A general rule of thumb that I generally go by: If 'you are' sounds weird, the word is 'your.' If that sounds weird, add an 's' to the end.

Another thing that bugs me is people mixing up where, were, and we're. Again, 'we're' is a descriptor that can be used in either the present or future tense. 'Were' is a verb(I think? Drawing on primary school lessons here) that describes a location in the past tense. 'Where' tells or asks the location in the present tense.
They're all very distinct, both in spelling and in pronunciation(at least in my region).
('Where were you?' 'We were at an arcade center.' 'We're going on your anniversary cruise and testing it as our honeymoon.')

Somehow, people also get 'know' and 'now' mixed up.
I don't even know how to express my frustration and disbelief right now.

(And yes, I know that a fair amount of people aren't very good at English because it's not their native language. This isn't directed at people like that.)