Pedants' Paradise

[french frank]

OTOH, whereas "I'm sat" is wrong too, I'd regard that as dialect. Is there perhaps a throwback to the French construction here - "Je suis assis(e)"?

Interesting point! I'm sure there are reasons to accept or reject the hypothesis, though I'm not sure what they would be.

Some usages are largely archaic in 'English English' (Scottish??), too, rather than incorrect - the use of 'gotten', for example, a standard form in American English as the simple past participle (and surviving in forgotten, ill-gotten, misbegotten). But may well return - who knows? - under the influence of American usage ...

[umslopogaas]

Apologies if someone (possibly me) has already posted this, I havent the tenacity to read back through 26 pages to check. It is attributed to Winston Churchill. Someone was rash enough to point out to the great man that he had ended a sentence in one of his speeches with a preposition and this was grammatically incorrect.

"This", thundered Sir Winston, "is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

[Pabmusic]

Apologies if someone (possibly me) has already posted this, I havent the tenacity to read back through 26 pages to check. It is attributed to Winston Churchill. Someone was rash enough to point out to the great man that he had ended a sentence in one of his speeches with a preposition and this was grammatically incorrect.

"This", thundered Sir Winston, "is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

I suspect that Churchill was well aware that the 'rule' (never end a sentence with a preposition) was one of the many 'artificial rules' made up in the 17th and 18th Centuries, with no basis in English grammar. Others are 'don't start a sentence with a conjunction' and 'don't split an infinitive'.

[vinteuil]

"This", thundered Sir Winston, "is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

[PJPJ]

From a link from the above:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperforeignism

The following is an example of wikicrap.

"Afrikaans word
In the Afrikaans, the letter combination sch is pronounced [sk] (as in 'school'). However, most English speakers pronounce it as [ʃ] ("sh") following the rules for German, in words such as Rooibosch and veldschoen."

This is not true for "Rooibosch", "Rondebosch", "Stellenbosch" - no South African or German I've ever met pronounces this last as "Stellenbosk".

As for the second word of the examples given, here's another wiki page with the correct Afrikaans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veldskoen

[gurnemanz]

I can't understand why people get upset by usage such as "he was at on the chair" used in a similar sense to "he was sitting". There are much worse offences. (eg "amount" instead of "number" with the plural of countable nouns, where the issue is cut and dried.) It is certainly very common in standard Northern English, even with educated speakers. We are like chameleons where language is concerned and can easily adopt usage without being aware of it. So prevalent is "was sat" that I have more than once found myself "infected" by it and been decried for saying it. I worked at the English Department of German university for four years and as a native speaker I functioned as an oracle for dilemmas of usage and would sometimes be asked by the professor of linguistics: "Can you say this?". I once answered categorically "no" to the point raised. I was talking to him a few weeks later and he pointed out that I had just come out with the utterance which I had previously rejected.

There is potential confusion with verb forms like "was sat" in that there is a surface ambiguity:
"The child was sat in the back of the car" can either passive - we put him there, based on "to sit" as a transitive verb or the alleged substandard alternative to "was sitting", based on the intransitive verb.

It seems to me that a decent case can be made for the latter non-passive usage in order to denote the intransitive concept of having putting oneself into a particular position, as opposed to simply being in that position which the present continuous "was sitting" conveys. Other examples of this might be "was lain" "was hung" "was knelt".

"We were stood at the checkout for 10 minutes" conveys a bit more more than "we were standing" and "we stood", being more emphatic and even expressing annoyance.

Via Google I found the following usage in a scholarly text: "Just two days after the Feast of St. Ann a miracle took place, while the priests were knelt in prayer they were startled by a tremendous rumble followed by a deafening silence." Even a a pedant might read this without feeling compelled to suggest that "were knelt" should be "were kneeling".

[french frank]

It seems to me that a decent case can be made for the latter non-passive usage in order to denote the intransitive concept of having put[ting] oneself into a particular position, as opposed to simply being in that position which the present continuous "was sitting" conveys.

I would use 'had seated himself'. Thereafter he 'was sitting' or 'was seated'.

"We were stood at the checkout for 10 minutes" conveys a bit more more than "we were standing"

Probably only to those who would naturally choose 'were stood'. 'Standing' has a much stronger idea of the continuity of the action to me.

On ''were knelt' - pass for the moment

All that said, I'm really only commenting in light of my own usage, not in any sense of telling others what to use.


On 'were knelt': 'to kneel' is used slightly differently from 'to sit'. The former cannot be used transitively and therefore doesn't warrant a reflexive form either. Perhaps?

[Extended Play]

In studying the evolution of a language, how do you know when a "tipping point" has been reached? By that, I mean the point at which a previously frowned-upon word or usage gains such wide currency as to be generally accepted as "correct".

In cricket reports, batsmen seem to have "top-scored" for years now, without any outcry. (In a current affairs programme on Radio 4 the other day, I think I heard that an awkward question was going to be "straight-batted"!)

"To appeal" is now often used as a transitive verb, e.g. "to appeal the verdict". Even the noun "impact" is making inroads as a verb: how will this impact the future of English?

You may deplore these developments, but as a previous poster said in another context, they're not going to go away.

Perhaps these trends have been accelerated by the prevalence of texts and tweets, which force users to compress forms of expression.

[vinteuil]

In studying the evolution of a language, how do you know when a "tipping point" has been reached? By that, I mean the point at which a previously frowned-upon word or usage gains such wide currency as to be generally accepted as "correct".
.

... an interesting question indeed. A 'descriptive' grammar or dictionary (OED is by and large such) - if it describes usage, what about one nutter who completely mangles English - is his 'usage' to be incorporated in a description of what constitutes English usage?

It's an example of the problems addressed by fuzzy logic and Wang's Paradox ("How many hairs are there on the head of a bald man?") - or more formally, the philosophical area of sorites -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/

[Nick Armstrong]

"I was stood standin' there"[/I][/B]...

A Lancastrianism, too: one of the catch phrases of Hylda Baker (1914-78).

Ah-HA!

'Appen me gran war quotin' Hylda tha'knows!! (She war a Salford lass married into Bradford wool!)

[mangerton]

One of my personal bugbears is the use of "lay" for "lie". "Lay" can be lots of things besides the past tense of "lie", , but never conjugable into its present or future tense, as in, "I'll lay down and you can get me an aspirin". But this in my experience is a colloquialism right across the UK - as indeed, incidentally, is substituting "sat" for "sitting".

In (traditional, standard, dare I say "correct as used by pedants like us ") English, "to lay" is a transitive* verb. This is demonstrated in the prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep". "To lie" is not. In my book, this is not a colloquialism, but just plain wrong, and something up with which we should not be expected to put!

* I'm sure that no-one reading these messages needs to be told that a transitive verb takes an object.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

"This", thundered Sir Winston, "is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!"

What about this one, from a boy who didn't like the book about Australia that his mother was reading to him?

What have you brought that book I don't like being read to out of about Down Under up for?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If you can justify "I was stood/sat", then it must be acceptable to say "I was ate my breakfast".

Sports commentators from London and Leicester say "we were sat"; it isn't just a northern phenomenon, though it is more prominent north of Nottingham. When I taught in Derbyshire, many of the children spoke in this way, but the teachers always corrected them. In North Yorkshire, however, a large number of teachers speak in this sloppy way themselves.

[Mahlerei]

You're right, dis kak. :)

[umslopogaas]

#267 Ein Alpensinfonie: Phew! ... a prepositional feast, methinks, if ...

I never before saw so much verbal glue with so little to join.