On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 20:58:28 -0600, "Edward Dolan" <[email hidden]>
wrote in message : said:Quoted message said:Ed, you are without question far more Oprah than opera.
Quoted message said:I spent every Saturday afternoon of my youth listening to the Met Opera
broadcasts on the radio. Man, those Wagner operas were really long. Some of
them would start at 12:30 and not be over until 5:00. How did you spend your
Saturday afternoons when you were a youth?
Depends on what you mean by youth. Over the years I spent Saturday
afternoons reading, model making, playing games, riding my bike,
helping out at classical concerts and music festivals, helping in the
local cathedral and showing prospective parents round my
thousand-year-old school.
These days I'm more likely to be at home with the kids and listening
to the Met opera broadcast on BBC Radio 3...
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:So potter along to an English newsgroup such as the quintessentially
English uk.rec.sheds, where anything Leftpondian is eschewed and even
the words Senapr and Treznal must be ROTed to save the delicate
sensibilities - here you will find the phrase and its minor variants
sufficiently common that they are often abbreviated to FSVO (for some
values of), FCVO (for certain values of) etc.
Quoted message said:If it is not in a standard dictionary and it's use illustrated, then it
should not be used.
According to this definition no new usage would ever be permitted, no
usage would be tolerated unless and until it had been cited in the
dictionary. That is the wrong way round. In practice the dictionary
follows usage, and changes over time; examples in the dictionary are
often taken from what were at the time new or emergent usage. If this
were not so we would all still be using English as Dr Johnson did.
How about this: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that
is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim, and we sat in the
Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening,
a flip dark chill winter [censored] though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a
milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these
mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody
very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well,
what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no license
for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of
the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you
could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two
other veshches which would give you a nice quick horrorshow fifteen
minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left
shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk
with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up
and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what
we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with."
That is from a writer commonly cited as a master of the written
language, author of many books set as part of the English literature
syllabus (and this one of was filmed by Stanley Kubrick). In the full
OED (the big one seen only at major libraries) there are examples of
usage cited from his books but never, to my knowledge, seen elsewhere.
The conclusion, and one to which he freely admitted, is that he made
it up as he went along - only he called it extending the boundaries.
An American might call it "pushing the envelope" - a usage which only
appeared in the OED very recently, having been absorbed from aviation
slang (it was used by my father back in the 60s and 70s, and in those
days anybody outside the industry would look blankly at him if he used
it).
Quoted message said:The standard for all English usage is what an educated
person would be expected to know, not something that can be drudged up from
an obscure source.
And, speaking as an educated person (and having passed public exams in
English language and literature to boot), I know I am right. So there
you go: the Dolan standard of proof.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Now provide an authority which states that I cannot use the phrase in
that way. No, on second thoughts, don't bother. It's irrelevant - a
grammar flame is a tacit acknowledgement that you have lost the
argument, and I am happy to accept it as such.
Quoted message said:What argument? We are discussing the use of "differing" used as a verb.
No, Ed, we were discussing your hypocrisy in calling Ed Gin on abuse
and obscenity despite your own use of these, as the record shows.
Your grammar flame was a distraction, and one of your more common
ones. And, as it turns out, you were wrong.
Quoted message said:I go by whether or not something looks and sounds right to me. That is
because I have an unfailing sense of what is correct. If it doesn't pass MY
test, then it is wrong.
I apply the same test. What you say feels wrong to me, therefore it
is wrong. And in this case I have the Google archive to help:
http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?selm=55gmsc%248a2%40samba.rahul.net&output=gplain
The first use in the Google archive of the phrase "for differing
values of" used in exactly the way I used it, back in November 1996.
Quoted message said:You need to find and show me a use of the word as you used it in a literary
text of some standing in order to convince me otherwise. Maybe something
from Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope?
Why stop there?
"Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde,
And al his hoost, in armes hym bisyde."
So there you have English as it really should be used, from one of the
greatest writers who ever lived - still read and studied over six
hundred years after his death.
Or should we stick with Elizabethan English, as codified by Johnson in
the original OED?
"A victorie is twice it selfe, when the atchieuer
brings home full numbers: I finde heere, that Don Peter
hath bestowed much honor on a yong Florentine, called
Claudio"
"Much deseru'd on his part, and equally remembred
by Don Pedro, he hath borne himselfe beyond the
promise of his age, doing in the figure of a Lambe, the
feats of a Lion, he hath indeede better bettred expectation,
then you must expect of me to tell you how"
The aptly titled "Much adoe about Nothing", as accurate a description
of your complaint here as could be wished for. I find it amusing that
Eng. Lit students will often argue the toss regarding spelling and
grammar while cheerfully accepting the primacy in the canon of English
literature of a man who could not even spell his own name
consistently.
A 1950 text on correct grammar and usage would read (does read - I
have one) as hopelessly archaic now. Punctuation in particular has
changed almost beyond recognition. The books of Waugh read as well
and as wittily as ever, but if you study the punctuation and
word-order you see that it is not in line with modern usage, and if
you concentrate too hard on the language it grates in places and ruins
your enjoyment of the story. Who is right? Grammar is a largely
arbitrary construct, and is far less immutable than you might like to
think. I have no doubt that the freshest of modern texts will seem
archaic to my children when they reach adulthood.
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound
