At college, a girl was asking the teacher what you do if someone says something grammatically wrong in class. The teacher said you have to be sensitive to the way they speak. This girl said "but it's not even a child in my class. It's someone in college. I've heard someone say "We done this". To me, that's just wrong."
I wanted to smash her stupid smug face in. I knew who she meant - one of the othersis from Stepney, it's just the way he speaks. He' s a proper, bona fide, apple-me-pears East End Cockney with an accent to match, and yes, he says, " we done this" not "we did this" but he makes everyone laugh and also has charisma to burn. She on the other hand is a flat-faced mooncow with an annoying voice, however impeccable her grammar might be.
I went into a rant about people understanding how you use one language with your friends and another with your bank manager ("That's called register" said the teacher) and how even children pick up on what to use when. So stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, you flat-faced mooncow.
You can't say the way someone speaks is wrong, if that's what they've been surrounded by, growing up. In speech we break the laws of grammar all the time - and anyway, grammar isn't really fixed, it changes over the years, like all parts of language. Innit?
About Courbet (yet again)
16 minutes ago
4 comments:
Yup! Ya said it!
I think we all have certain phrases everyone hates. "My bad" is a popular one to hate, although it doesn't bother me. "That'll learn em" grinds me, but I know it was an said intentionally cause those who used it liked to phrase things that way, and I say plenty of annoying things, so you just need to move on.
Same with spelling and my written grammar (loose/lose, their/their, where/were) which if you read my site, you'll know everyone keeps picking on. My brain is wired for maths, not spelling/written grammar. Being pedantic is all well and fine, but people need to accept different wiring.
In linguistics at university I learnt that this does happen with language as you said...we use one language with our friends and another with our bank manager or boss.
Prescribing the way people SHOULD speak kills a language. Ask Latin. Oh, but Latin died.
Daniel you can't fight it. Language changes. Or we'd all still be going around saying "Forsooth" and "Egads".
Adrian, wrong spelling? Hadn't
noticed ;) I think what really annoyed me about this girl was a subtext about class and class snobbery, which you may have noticed we are a bit hung up on in this country.
Lady Louington, thanks for your warm support. It's a long time since anyone called me babe.
Academic suppport from GG! I like it.
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