[markdown]

I live in a post-colonial country where English is the official language but 90% of the population have another language as their mother-tongue.

There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).

Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.

Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.

A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?

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Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.

[resu_nimda]

A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.

Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.

If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.

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Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.

[markdown]

I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions.

What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.

Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

[dhimes]

"Enormity" is one of those words. It used to be strictly "horrible," conveying a sense of wickedness, and to use it as a synonym for "enormousness" was glaringly wrong. But the mistake was so common, even among journalists and writers, that that it has gained acceptance in at least one English dictionary.

[maximuscoolimus]

Brush him off.

As a foreigner I feel the same about English and its declining quality of grammar on the web

[tacotime]

I think it's just an evolution. Not every experiment is successful.

[mtVessel]

Biweekly means every two weeks. Semiweekly means twice a week. (Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth.)

Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!

[jejones3141]

OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!

[mtVessel]

So you're saying that when I correct someone publicly, I'm not being an insufferable pedant, I'm contemporaneously documenting usage for future linguists!

Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.

[jacalata]

> Biweekly means every two weeks.

Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...

[mtVessel]

Hmm. Guess I should have looked it up before posting. Serves me right for not being more bi-curious.

[thedufer]

While it has meant both every two weeks and twice a week for a long time, this is an interesting case where convincing people otherwise would pretty clearly improve our language. Even the page you linked to implies this:

> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-

[merrua]

> Fortnightly doesn't mean anything outside of the Commonwealth

Really? I live and learn. I thought that was commonplace.

[teh_klev]

In the spirit the correctness and accuracy, which Commonwealth? :)

[mtVessel]

Point taken. Um...the one(s) where a 'fortnight' is still a thing?

[tacotime]

"Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it."

...literally describes our ENTIRE language. It's kinda what language is... I know "kinda" isn't officially a word yet but I like it and I'm guessing you know my intended meaning.