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objecting to use of ber

In a wall street journal article recently, the reporter described indicted lobbyist as an ber, I wrote the below letter; like to have your feedback: Thank you for your article, which I enjoyed...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

I'm sometimes torn on some of these things. I accept that language change is inevitable and that language use is just custom anyway - why one word is considered better than another is largely due to...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Yup, that's the way it goes. No matter how many linguistics courses you take, it's virtually impossible to escape that irrational resentment at new forms. We don't like forms of music or styles of...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Is it all that unreasonable to make value judgements on new forms? Some seem more destined to cause confusion than others. Make value judgements and then move on. :-)

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Is it all that unreasonable to make value judgements on new forms? Some seem more destined to cause confusion than others. If they work they'll last, if they don't they won't.Edited to attempt...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

It is also important to realize that complaining about a new (or old) form is not going to affect its acceptance one whit. Examples of usage police actually winning fights are vanishingly rare....

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Richard, another Pyrrhic victory: constructions such as "For John and I, that was a problem" seem to have come from students being admonished not to use "John and me" as the subject of a sentence....

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Is it all that unreasonable to make value judgements on new forms?Yes. It's like a mother saying "is it all that unreasonable to make value judgements on children?" In theory, no, but it's impossible...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Quote:All those linguistic crusades and drawing of lines in the sand and banishing of words are mere spitting in the wind."It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Quote:another Pyrrhic victory: constructions such as "For John and I, that was a problem" seem to have come from students being admonished not to use "John and me" as the subject of a sentence.I would...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Quote:Once these words have become unquestioned parts of the language, it's easy to see how silly those judgments were; the only reasonable conclusion is that our own similar judgments are probably...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Excellent examples; I'll add them to my repertoire.ccatanach: Borges was a wonderful writer, but he knew no more about the roots of language than a random person in the street.

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Quote:Borges was a wonderful writer, but he knew no more about the roots of language than a random person in the street.be that as it may, lh, are not dictionaries writ for the person in the street?...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Ah, OK. Sorry, I missed your emphasis.

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Re: objecting to use of ber

no blood, no foul. ;-)

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Re: objecting to use of ber

I feel happier about language change that comes about as a result of a slow evolutionary process, where the meaning of a word or phrase just drifts naturally or almost naturally over a period of time,...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

OK, I have to ask: LH, did you intentionally try to create the in a different way back at the bottom of page 2? Because all the other u-umlauts look OK to me except your and OPT's quoting of yours,...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

I'm seeing exactly the same as Dr T. Switching the encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) doesn't help;the three characters are replaced by a solitary question mark.

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Re: objecting to use of ber

Whoa, that's weird -- I'm seeing it too. No, all I did was hit Reply; it should have automatically transferred the Subject line. Yuck, it's in this one too; I'm going to change it to a plain u because...

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Re: objecting to use of ber

"It is also important to realize that complaining about a new (or old) form is not going to affect its acceptance one whit. Examples of usage police actually winning fights are vanishingly rare."True....

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