A personal Peewee of mine.

It's OK that slang emerges and is used. Even widely in society. Languages change and evolve all the time.

BUT..... ( and here comes the big AAAARRRGGGHHHH)
When reporting in the news. Be it in newspapers, on TV, or what ever you are going to communicate to the wider public.....
Learn FFS to pronounce the words.

I was just watching the Danish News on TV, and there is one word that made my hair stand on end.
Psycriatry rather the Psychiatry.

And the days I get a horrible urge to take a red pen to the newspaper and then send it back are increasing in frequency.

I don't know if this is a special Danish thing or if the spoken language is degrading everywhere.
I would feel, not better, but a touch relieved if the latter is the case.

With a potato in your throat it is quite understandable that one would say psycriatry. I am impressed that you've been able to keep the standard up for so long as you have.

I have noticed a lot of English word creeping in, especially talking to people who play online games.

akigr8 wrote:With a potato in your throat it is quite understandable that one would say psycriatry. I am impressed that you've been able to keep the standard up for so long as you have.

I have noticed a lot of English word creeping in, especially talking to people who play online games.

As if Norwegians spoke any clearer. HA.

Goddamn British stole our language, and they can't even come CLOSE to pronouncing most of it properly.

What I don't understand is that, after 10 years of school, 3 years of college and 4 years of university, followed by a least a year of being a "foal" somewhere, they STILL can't spell and speak correctly.

I've actually become a lot more lenient in my tolerance of "unorthodox" pronounciation. I work with a lot of Chinese, most of whom speak English to a reasonable level. As native speakers of any language, the standard to which we hold fellow native speakers is often pedantic in the extreme, after all it's your mothertongue, learn to speak it properly.

But the fact is, it doesn't really matter. As long as the meaning is clear, then I don't really care for discrepencies in pronounciation.

Correctly using the language itself is another matter. If a Chinese says "there was one person less on the team" I'll brush it off, because I understand what they mean, and being a pedant is counterproductive most of the time. But I expect better of the BBC, where I hear "different than" on a daily basis. Another odd one, is where you hear an item being discussed on the news, and a name or uncommon word is pronounced correctly by several different people in a short period of time, and then an anchor or reporter will come up with a completely incorrect pronounciation, weren't they listening?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLuaqNoxjro[/youtube]

Language doesn't degrade. It gets modified and adapted and evolves.

Jbags wrote:I've actually become a lot more lenient in my tolerance of "unorthodox" pronounciation. I work with a lot of Chinese, most of whom speak English to a reasonable level. As native speakers of any language, the standard to which we hold fellow native speakers is often pedantic in the extreme, after all it's your mothertongue, learn to speak it properly.

But the fact is, it doesn't really matter. As long as the meaning is clear, then I don't really care for discrepencies in pronounciation.

Correctly using the language itself is another matter. If a Chinese says "there was one person less on the team" I'll brush it off, because I understand what they mean, and being a pedant is counterproductive most of the time. But I expect better of the BBC, where I hear "different than" on a daily basis. Another odd one, is where you hear an item being discussed on the news, and a name or uncommon word is pronounced correctly by several different people in a short period of time, and then an anchor or reporter will come up with a completely incorrect pronounciation, weren't they listening?

As in saying Psycryatist when they just interviewed some staff at a psychiatric hospital who continuously referred to the head, which happens to be referred to as "the leading PSYCHIATRIST" ?

And I get both more tolerant and more intolerant.
I don't mind dialects, slang and very obvious new ways of using the language.

But I DO mind when an anchor or reporter can't pronounce commonly used words correctly (or use them correctly), and when a newspaper reporter quite clearly is incapable of, both spelling, and creating sentence structures that makes sense.
After all those people speak to EVERYBODY, not just the people under 27.

Sarah Palin stands by made-up word 'refudiate,' compares self to Shakespeare

Jbags wrote:
Correctly using the language itself is another matter. If a Chinese says "there was one person less on the team" I'll brush it off, because I understand what they mean, and being a pedant is counterproductive most of the time. But I expect better of the BBC, where I hear "different than" on a daily basis. Another odd one, is where you hear an item being discussed on the news, and a name or uncommon word is pronounced correctly by several different people in a short period of time, and then an anchor or reporter will come up with a completely incorrect pronounciation, weren't they listening?

Did you know that the 'rule' against different than was made up by ONE man for irrational reasons in the 18th century, based on no research whatsoever into how people actually spoke English? It's all an irrational preference of one man - one that a lot of people that like to think they're clever like to use to criticize other people or think less of other people for not adhering to.

I've heard priests on the radio pronouncing Diözese as Diözöse.

People unfamiliar with German may think I'm a nasty nitpicker; however, I can assure you I'm not.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbSSQe6vsSw[/youtube]

Gallstones wrote:Language doesn't degrade. It gets modified and adapted and evolves.

Nope, it's simply degrading everyday!

Language degradation is not caused by chavs, teenagers, text-speak or even Americans.

It's caused by people who rename soap as a 'cleansing bar'.

Ouch! That video was painful to watch, but also refreshing to see more appreciation of language. I failed my English GCSE...twice, but I seem to care more than most people when a word is incorrectly pronounced.

Well I does my bits.

Stephen Fry on the subject.

Does anybody think that the apostrophe that seem's to be creeping into plural's and, well, anything ending in an "s" will eventually be adopted as standard ?

twistor59 wrote:Does anybody think that the apostrophe that seem's to be creeping into plural's and, well, anything ending in an "s" will eventually be adopted as standard ?

Don't you mean a's?

mraltair wrote:

twistor59 wrote:Does anybody think that the apostrophe that seem's to be creeping into plural's and, well, anything ending in an "s" will eventually be adopted as standard ?

Don't you mean a's?

Nope, the s is unnecessary because the next word starts with s.