The Language (and travel) Thread

[SherlockedCAMPer]

How common is the line "not on my watch" actually?
Watching Zygon Inversion and it jumped at me even in the German translation.

Common enough for people to know it but not so common that it is used by a lot of people often. Although some people might use it often.

As for ‘hon’ I get it a fair amount from older people and people from the southern US. I don’t get it so much from the younger crowd unless they come from the south.

[Carol the Dabbler]

31 minutes ago, Hikari said:

"the Idiot Please" sounds more like "the Snotty Please" to me.  It feels like the people who are reflecting that back to me are annoyed with me for having to ask me to repeat myself.  Could just be the individuals I've run into, but it almost sounds hostile.  "Please?(I imagine it like "Please??!" like "What?! Why are you wasting my time?"

Guess that's the difference between Cincy and just north of Rhode Island. To me, their please sounded sincere, nearly to the point of subservience -- and if there's anything that irks me, it's subservience -- like the phone support guy (clearly from/in India) who kept calling me "Carol Ma'am," like a lacky in a Bollywood movie.

As for the "Hon" thing, there was a clerk (younger than me and about half my mother's age) in the local drugstore, back twenty years ago, who used to address Mom as "Hon.". Mom would smile and say thank you, but the minute her back was turned, she'd mutter "Hon" under her breath like a swear word.  I don't think it was so much the being called that by a younger person -- more the tone, which was (perhaps unintentionally) kind of condescending.

I'm like Mom in that I don't mind being called Hon as long as it sounds friendly.

[J.P.]

23 hours ago, SherlockedCAMPer said:

Common enough for people to know it but not so common that it is used by a lot of people often. Although some people might use it often.

So we can accuse Steven of plagiarism of his own lines? It wouldn't be the only case. But the line is damn powerful if used in a right moment.

 

[SherlockedCAMPer]

I hear it more from Hollywood than I do in real life.

[Arcadia]

Well, it's a common enough phrase that I don't think it's plagiarism to reuse it. That would be like saying that "The game is on!" is plagiarism.

What is Zygon Inversion?

[J.P.]

An episode of Dr Who. Written by Mr Moff.

[HerlockSholmes]

I often get irritated by the strange use of words in modern speech. One that has evolved in this country amongst the younger (20s and 30s usually) is to begin a sentence with an unnecessary ‘so.’

You here it on quiz shows were the questionmaster says:

’Sarah, tell us what you do for a living?’

and she replies:

’‘So I work for an IT company.’

Then he says:

’That’s great and what are your hobbies?’

And she replies:

’So I like to travel...’

Why?

Very annoying!

[HerlockSholmes]

Another one is...why can’t people say the word ‘really’ without repeating it? For some it’s almost natural that the word has to be used twice.

’That film was really, really good.’

’We all thought it was really, really funny.’

Does this happen elsewhere or just here?

 

[SherlockedCAMPer]

It definitely happens in my part of the US (at least) as well and I’ve probably been guilty of using it on occasion, though not often.

[Hikari]

3 hours ago, HerlockSholmes said:

Another one is...why can’t people say the word ‘really’ without repeating it? For some it’s almost natural that the word has to be used twice.

’That film was really, really good.’

’We all thought it was really, really funny.’

Does this happen elsewhere or just here?

 

Herl,

If I hadn't seen your icon attached to this post, I'd have assumed an American wrote it.  We really, really say that here a lot.  I guess it replaces 'very' as an emphatic word.

[HerlockSholmes]

2 hours ago, Hikari said:

Herl,

If I hadn't seen your icon attached to this post, I'd have assumed an American wrote it.  We really, really say that here a lot.  I guess it replaces 'very' as an emphatic word.

Now I know who to blame 🇺🇸😀

[HerlockSholmes]

Does the ‘so’ thing happen in The States? That one annoys me the most🙂

[Hikari]

12 minutes ago, HerlockSholmes said:

Does the ‘so’ thing happen in The States? That one annoys me the most🙂

So it so totally does.  Like, really, really a lot.

This seems to be a fairly recent affectation and I admit that I've picked it up a bit . . .more often in my written posts than in my speaking.  There's no real need or excuse for that place holder other than to sound like a breezy raconteur who is dropping in mid-anecdote.

"So I was telling her . .girl, your butt looks really, really tiny in those jeans.  Like, for real."

 

Soooo .. turnabout is fair play--do your British young people say "Like" all the time, too?

[HerlockSholmes]

Yes they do☹️

‘Turnabout is fair play’ hasn’t reach here yet though.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Herlock and Hikari -- I think you're talking about two different uses of "so."

The examples Hikari gave sound like a substitute for "As I was saying...."

I've also heard "so" used to mean something like "I don't understand what's going on, but I don't like it" -- as in "So what's *your* problem?!"

The examples Herlock gave sound totally brainless and utterly superfluous to the meaning of the sentence.  But it just occurred to me that maybe they're equivalent to "Er..." or "Umm," merely giving the speaker time to think of what they actually want to say -- perfectly understandable when they're being interviewed on television!

[Arcadia]

I always think of those kinds of things as "Valley Girl" type speech ... that is, deliberately affected. And yes, it's really, really annoying. Which, come to think of it, is probably the point ...

The funny thing is, if I hear it enough, I start picking it up too. Okay, maybe that's not so funny, and just really, really pathetic ....

 

[J.P.]

A question: the word "penthouse" was my online translator choice to translate "the flat under the roof" (that one with aslope walls, small mansard windows etc)
Penthouse seems to have a touch of luxury around it. What would be the best word to describe a normal flat under a roof?

[Hikari]

3 minutes ago, J.P. said:

A question: the word "penthouse" was my online translator choice to translate "the flat under the roof" (that one with aslope walls, small mansard windows etc)
Penthouse seems to have a touch of luxury around it. What would be the best word to describe a normal flat under a roof?

Haha!  Yes, those online translators sometimes are wide of the mark.

"Penthouse" is indeed, the prime apartment in a luxury building--the most expensive, because it encompasses the entire top floor, usually with its own private elevator, and proprietary access to the roof itself as part of the apartment, with the attendant views.

A more modest under-the-roof apartment . . hmm,  attic flat, maybe?

Or we'd be most likely to say 'top-floor apartment' in the states.  'Penthouse' in this instance would be basically a joke.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Or for *very* modest quarters -- the traditional home of starving artists -- "garret" would be an appropriate word.

[J.P.]

Oh, when I don't want to stress the fact of living under a roof, I simply call my apartment "a shoe box".

[Sheerluck]

Funny how things change. Servants used to live in attic, now billionaires do.

[Carol the Dabbler]

I've lived in two houses that were designed (circa 1910) to have servant's quarters in the attic.  I don't think those quarters were ever finished and used as such, however.

[cavaradossi]

Umm, it strikes me, Carol, that I've not seen or heard the word "garret" used in American English in decades. I can't imagine why since it's a perfectly fine word describing a floor found in many a house. I've even got one in mine, though I never go up there or even refer to it. If it ever crosses my mind, it's to worry about the possibility of wasps or bats taking up residence there.  Thankfully, that's never happened!

That business about "so" bugs me, too., as does the persistent misuse of the word "is" when discussing plural subjects. It makes me want to shout into the night sky "The word is "are"' , people! News anchors on both TV and radio almost unfailingly make this mistake, as do everyday people in conversation and writing. Set me straight on this: English is still taught in schools, right? 

As for the now ancient, set in stone, endless use of "like", I've long since gotten over the useless annoyance I used to feel about it. From time to time, though, I do wonder how they decide that "like" should be used here and not there, and not there but here in a sentence. In other words, are there rules about this use? 

 As far as the use of double "really" goes, I'm expecting the day when it becomes the norm to use the word three times or more in combination. After all, isn't that what progression is all about? Oh, a great day, it's a comin'!

 

 

[Arcadia]

I agree, that would be really, really, really progressive:  

[Carol the Dabbler]

3 hours ago, cavaradossi said:

I've not seen or heard the word "garret" used in American English in decades. I can't imagine why since it's a perfectly fine word describing a floor found in many a house. I've even got one in mine, though I never go up there or even refer to it. If it ever crosses my mind, it's to worry about the possibility of wasps or bats taking up residence there.

I think it got to be sort of a cliche word, so strongly associated with starving artists that people stopped using it in any other context.  I mostly say "attic" myself.  You remind me of this passage from a James Thurber piece, "The Black Magic of Barney Haller":

Barney turned his little squinty blue eyes on me.

"We go to the garrick now and become warbs," he said.

"The hell we do!" I thought to myself, quickly [....]

Of course I figured out finally what he meant about the garrick and the warbs: he had simply got horribly mixed up in trying to tell me that he was going up to the garret and clear out the wasps [....]

8 hours ago, cavaradossi said:

I do wonder how they decide that "like" should be used here and not there, and not there but here in a sentence. In other words, are there rules about this use?

Are you talking about the beatnik-type use of the word?  Or something a bit more recent?  If you can give a few examples of the usage you're talking about, I'd be delighted to attempt a translation!

8 hours ago, cavaradossi said:

As far as the use of double "really" goes, I'm expecting the day when it becomes the norm to use the word three times or more in combination. After all, isn't that what progression is all about?

Not necessarily.  After all, the double negative used to be a perfectly proper English-language way to emphasize your point (in fact Chaucer once wrote something along the lines of "He didn't never say nothing to nobody"), until some pedantic soul decided that "two negatives make a positive" and bullied the entire English-speaking world into dropping a useful mode of expression.

If I had to pick one pet linguistic peeve, I think it would have to be "I could care less."  I assume this came about because a lot of people are kinda sloppy about pronouncing their "couldn't" so that it comes out more like "couldn'," on top of which they sort of swallow the "n," so that people who aren't already familiar with the phrase hear it as "could."

Coupled with that, we all use an awful lot of expressions without thinking about what they actually mean.  So it doesn't matter to a lot of people that "I could care less" means the opposite of what they're meaning to say, namely that they don't care a single bit, and therefore it would be logically impossible for them to care any less.

However, we picky souls all need to remember that it's the nature of language to change over time.  If it didn't, we'd be writing this in Anglo-Saxon.