English Grammar, Spelling and Vocabulary

[Wolfgang]

Maybe they wanted to write "older cars' owners"...

[Moonraker]

Or older-car owners...

[Courtenay]

Either of those would make sense. Going by the Beeb's current track record, though (I quite often spot silly errors in articles), if they tried writing "older cars' owners" it would probably come out as "older car's owners", meaning the owners of only one older car...

[Courtenay]

Here's something else from the Beeb that has me shaking my head (somewhere in between laughter and incredulity) — to be fair, in this case they're simply using a direct quote from a young person who obviously hasn't been taught what "literally" actually means (this was a chronic problem even when I was at school in the 1990s). But the fact that they didn't cleverly edit that word out does make the BBC look almost as silly as the person they're quoting. This is in an article about body-shaming and other bullying behaviour at Britain's top ballet schools:

Ellen says within her first two weeks [at the Royal Ballet School] she was body-shamed by her ballet teacher, who positioned her in front of the mirror.

"She said to me, 'if I had a knife, this is what I would cut off'. And she literally cut my entire bum off, kind of all of half my thigh, basically, and then a third of my calf."

Ummm... if this teacher literally cut this girl's entire bum off, plus half her thigh and a third of her calf, then not only would it be a case for both the police and the nearest A&E department, but there'd have been a terrible mess on the floor...

[Boatbuilder]

The peron in question is 30-years-old when she makes that statement, so should know what 'literally' means by that age. Maybe the person who interviewed her for that quote should have questioned her about her use of the word.

[Courtenay]

Indeed. Or whoever wrote up the article could have just altered the quote slightly with some handy square brackets: "And she [pretended to] cut my entire bum off..." (They often do that in BBC articles when they're quoting someone directly and there's a need to clarify the wording, or to cover up the fact that the person quoted didn't use grammatically correct sentences.)

[Anita Bensoussane]

The peron in question is 30-years-old when she makes that statement, so should know what 'literally' means by that age. Maybe the person who interviewed her for that quote should have questioned her about her use of the word.

I'm sure the interviewer wouldn't have dreamt of doing that. Ellen Elphick was telling an emotional personal story about an incident which caused her eating disorder to worsen, and the reporter's job was to listen and record the details - not to pull her up on her vocabulary. Mistakes like that often crop up in speech but it's obvious from the rest of Ellen's account that the ballet teacher didn't actually take a knife to her. Interrupting her to question the use of the word "literally" would have been insensitive and might have made Ellen feel awkward and clam up.

As Courtenay said, reporters generally make things crystal clear by altering the wording slightly when quoting speech that isn't grammatical, using square brackets to show where that has been done. That would certainly have been an option in this case.

[dsr]

Susie Dent says that "literally" has been (mis)used so often that it is now in the dictionary as meaning "figuratively" as well as its original meaning.

Not sure I agree with her, but she is the expert!

[Courtenay]

Yes, I've heard that too. The problem is that you then have one word with two exactly opposite meanings, and how then are we supposed to tell whether someone means "literally" literally or not??

[Bertie]

It wouldn't surprise me.
I imagine the dictionary will go / has gone the same way as everything else and dumbed down to pander to the lowest common denominators. It used to be things remained high brow and set a standard and were looked up to - nowadays it pretty much feels like 'the inmates are running the asylum' and in order to survive and stay 'relevant' everything is having to dumb down.

[Moonraker]

[Boatbuilder]

There are so many different dictionaries online these days that if you decide you have to look-up a word for one reason or another, you then have to decide which dictionary you look in. Some dictionaries contain words that other don't so you're never really sure what to believe, especially if its a word you haven't come across before. If it's not in, let's say, the 'Oxford Dictionary', but it's in the 'Free Dictionary' - a common dictionary that pops up regularly if you just search for a word - it makes you wonder about that word.

[Boodi 2]

I always use the Collins dictionary, probably because I have it as an app/program on my PC. While editing an article this morning I came across the term "do's and don'ts" and as I thought that the apostrophes looked a bit odd (I would have omitted the apostrophe in "do's") I checked it both online and in the Collins and seemingly it is correct!!!

[Anita Bensoussane]

English has always evolved and will continue to alter, and what becomes regarded as "correct" is down to usage over time. Compilers of dictionaries have traditionally waited a while to see whether a new word or a new usage becomes firmly established before including it. With online dictionaries now being available, some compilers may perhaps decide to add a new word or new usage even though it may soon fall out of fashion. After all, it can always be deleted if necessary!

When a word or phrase is in flux (which may not lead to a lasting change, as some new usages are fleeting) it can be confusing, and that's what's happening with "literally" at the moment. I'd rather it kept the meaning of "actually, without exaggeration", but the more recent usage seems to have come from people using it as an intensifier, rather like the word "really".

Eventually, things will probably settle down one way or the other - though sometimes anomalies persist, e.g. "flammable" and "inflammable" aren't opposites even though they sound as if they ought to be! I've just looked up the reason why and found out that both "flammable" and "inflammable" come from the Latin word "flammere", meaning "to set on fire". The "in" of "inflammable" was actually derived from the prefix "en", which acts as an intensifier, rather than from the prefix "in", meaning "not". However, the derivation soon became unclear.

[Boatbuilder]

You would think that "don'ts" would have a second apostrophe before the "s" as the first one is in place of the omitted 'o'. How weird the English language is!

And to confuse even more, here is a screenshot from the online Cambridge Dictinary :



For me, dos (or DOS) is an abbreviation in computing for 'disk operating system'.