On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:06:20 +0100, "Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Please don't misunderstand me here. This is no language battle. I just > don't agree that something becomes "right" as long as the majority does it. > Neither do I think "right" is an adequate term for languages. Don't get me started! The abuse of 'lend' and 'borrow' is fairly pervasive and seems to be getting worse (e.g. people have a tendency to say 'can you borrow me £10' or 'can I lend £10 off of you'). 'teach' and 'learn' are similarly interchanged without the speaker being aware of how confused they sound...'she learned me how to speak' is just one horrible example! And, whilst mildly amusing, 'simples' (synonym for 'simple') is becoming more and more common thanks to a popular advert over here. I wonder whether it's our selfish nature that thinks this is acceptable, but in a world getting smaller by the day, it seems pretty presumptious/arrogant to think that non-native speakers should have to do the 'double-take' so as to figure out what the speaker actually meant as opposed to what they actually said. Mind you, when our government comes out with stupid slogans such as "the 3 'Rs" as to how to tackle falling standards in education, and those 3 R's consist of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic what chance do we have? Regards, Matt. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
