Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
You only make yourself look silly by attacking straw men. Nobody is saying that there are no foreign words in the English language. Nobody is saying that there should be no foreign words in the English language. All that people are saying is that this particular foreign word is a stupid one, an inferior one to what already exists, an ugly sounding one, and has a whelk's chance in a supernova of catching on.
New word usage happens organically, naturally, vitally, not by people begging, cajoling and campaigning for a word that almost nobody wants. That's the difference between coining a word and blooming it (my own neologism that won't catch on, based on past anti-ebook spammer Dan Bloom, who has, I see, moved on from trying to get newspapers and ebooks renamed to campaigning to get South Africa renamed " Mandelaland".) |
well, honestly, you've given me a perfect example of the *only* point i have been trying to make, which is the inexplicably virulent reaction of the people who dislike the word.
what makes a word "stupid" ? what makes it "inferior" ? "stupid" seems to me to be so arbitrary as to be indefensible, and as for inferior, i could probably make more than one argument against that if i cared to (i don't, because that is not the point i am making, and the whole argument seems frankly sterile to me). as for "ugly sounding"... well, it is certainly your right to find any word ugly sounding (i happen to think the word "puce" is quite unpleasant in english, for instance) but how on earth is that supposed to be anything other than your personal opinion ?
as for begging and cajoling... i haven't seen any of that, however i have seen quite a lot of rather extreme bullying tactics used by people who dislike the word, trying to suppress its usage.
if you don't like it, don't use it ! it's that simple. no-one is forcing you to. so why are you so dead-set on deciding what words other people can use ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
It's when people are simply assuming that something is normal, while it's not an accepted behaviour/word/action/whatever, I will start to rise.
For instance, when the word gets used in a news item thread title (as was the case a few months ago). These words need to grow, not forced.
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again, it seems a bit excessive to object with such animosity. after all, new words become part of commonly used language
by being used.