i found it hard, it's hard to find

A compilation of small things that are too short to blog about and Twitter is stupid it's just a mass convo site for us.

Oh well, whatever, never mind

I find it amusing when someone who never talks to me comes up to me asking a couple of questions (work related). Then they find out that I haven't fulfilled some sort of criterion of theirs and they say "nvm" and I think "wasn't going to anyway."

Clickity

It's bloody hard to click triplets with one hand and click quavers with another. I have not ever done it properly.

Like a sir

There are a couple words that I swear less than half the grade knows how to pronounce correctly (I was talking to Max about one of these words I forget):
Cambridge - CAME-bridge (not CAM-bridge)
Pronunciation - pro-NUN-see-ay-shun (exactly how it's spelt, basically). It's not pronounce-iation. So ironic that most can't pronounce the word that means to pronounce.
Penalise - PEE-na-lize (though maybe Americanised to PEN-uh-lize)
Cavalry - exactly how it's spelt. None of that "CAL-vary" crap please. Apparently Calvary is some place outside Jerusalem. Which I am sure you are not talking about. You are obviously talking about the Riders of Rohan =P
I would put "evolution" here but the alternate pronunciation is too mainstream and has been accepted by the dictionaries.

Pluralising

I really like the words that have the -um ending to pluralise into -a. Like datum-data, stratum-strata, medium-media. You feel like a boss for knowing that something as stupid as um->a is a form of plural.

Setting e.g.

I don't get people (in relative power) who watch over others and get them to ... stay quiet (for argument's sake). Or maybe put away their phones. Then after that they go chat with their chums. Or they pull out a phone and SMS a friend. While the peons can't talk back, and can't talk/use a phone anyway, there's gonna be a great lot of discontent and low morale and general loss of respect. It's so stupid to not set the example.


Yay finished. Hope you enjoy.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

>So ironic that most can't pronounce the word that means to pronounce.

I don't think you know what ironic means. You're in good company, though, and nobody really cares except anonymous commentators like me.

jwhero said...

Pretty sure this is situational irony.

Anonymous said...

Close, but not quite. When people mispronounce "pronunciation", they're usually just trying to say the word, not enunciate it.

jwhero said...

I think you'll find that obviously the relationship is more contrived if you put "pronunciation" against "enunciate". My intention was to show that it's ironic that people get the pronunciation of "pronunciation" wrong.

I can't be bothered with this. If really bugs you that much talk, go to your friends about it (Y)

Anonymous said...

Irony generally involves the production of an effect opposite to what was intended. When people say "pronunciation", they're usually not trying to pronounce it perfectly, they're just saying the word. It'd be ironic if an English teacher was trying to correct their student and mangled the word in the process, or some similar situation but for regular speech? I can't see the irony.

I can be bothered with this, because I'm a linguistic prescriptivist who believes the road to language hell is paved with descriptivism, and dictionaries are the our true bulwark against barbarism and savagery.

Anonymous said...

THE ABOVE ANON and JWHERO are both grammar/spelling/ something of that sort NAZIS. ==

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