Matthew Burgess schrieb: > Don't get me started! Go! Go! Go! :) (SCNR) > 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!
Yeah, not to mention raise/rise. 70% of German engineering students get that wrong all the time. Our professor said "If you're unsure, use 'increase'". > And, whilst mildly amusing, 'simples' (synonym for 'simple') is becoming more > and more common > thanks to a popular advert over here. But there was a rather smart joke in an advert, too, IIRC. It was for a Volvo car and said only "It shifts". I liked that one. In German advertisement industry there's also a new habit of inventing impossible words. One of the first was "unkaputtbar" (freely translated "un-broken-able"), and this spreads like the plaque ever since. > 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. Probably is, yes. On the other hand, from a communication theory point of view, you as the sender cannot be responsible for what the receiver interprets, because you don't know his background (or her, no offence) > 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? ... I pray this is a joke. Although I have to admit there _is_ an 'r' in every word, but so is an 'i' :) BTW, just to mention this, the German translation of the LFS book is very nice. Although I have a sound understanding of English language, I used the German book for my first two successful LFS systems (6.3 and 6.4). Cheerio, Jan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
