The Word Nerd

[JackDaw]

I love how completely unrelated conversations on these boards always manage to come back to comics

Lol. Yes.

But another example of common words getting mixed up..accepted in most places, but not in the far North (of England) punishment academy I attended. The distinction between “can” and “may”. This was dialogue one day:-

Edwards (lad of 12 summers): “Please, sir, can I go to the toilet?”
Teacher “Yes”.

So Edwards rises from desk to walk outside to toilet.

Teacher: “Who gave you permission to leave desk?”

Edwards: “You did”

Teacher “I did not, sit down”

Edwards, raises hand for permission to speak, and again asks “Please sir can I go to the toilet”

Teacher: “Yes”

And..of course..when Edwards tried to leave room, he was stopped again...

Eventually (and thankfully) one of Edwards friends managed to get a note to him. “Say, Please, MAY I go to the toilet”.

Can= physically able to do an action
May= request authority to do an action

[dancj]

Can= physically able to do an action
May= request authority to do an action

That one doesn't bother me in the slightest - and much of the time they are the same.

If the kid had ignored the teacher and tried to go to the toilet anyway, the teacher would likely have physically stopped him.

[Jim Kelly]

Saw a hand-written notice posted in my neighbourhood today, from someone who had lost their keys, and it said that if you found them you should leave them at the "costermer service" desk at the nearby supermarket. Everything else on the posting was written in perfectly good English. It was just "costermer"--instead of "customer"--that was spelled wrong. That got me to thinking how this person, probably writing out customer phonetically, had come up with that spelling.

[Jim Kelly]

When I read novels, they tend to be old ones, but I sometimes stumble upon word uses that puzzle me:

• lumber--actually meaning a piece of furniture, usually no longer in use
• secretary--meaning a small desk or a cabinet for papers
• corn--meaning any kind of grain and not actually the corn you eat on the cob
• making love--doesn't mean sex, just means pitching woo (saying passionate things to the opposite sex)
• awful--inspiring awe
• salon--doesn't mean something like a hair salon, it just means a place where people get together to talk

Even older words have really changed their meaning over time:

• knight used to mean a boy or youth
• girl used to mean any young person (male or female)
• novice was a new slave (in Roman times)
• a bachelor was a novice knight (a young squire)
• meat meant any kind of food
• a harbinger was someone who went ahead of the main party of travellers to arrange accommodation
• snobs mended shoes
• lewd was akin to layman, something outside the clergy
• nice meant foolish

[dancj]

corn--meaning any kind of grain and not actually the corn you eat on the cob

I think that use of "corn" is still pretty common - at least here in England. If people are talking about maize, they tend to call it "sweetcorn" or "corn on the cob" to be clear.

[Jim Kelly]

That "sweetcorn" confuses me, because corn isn't exactly sweet.

In Canada, we have a mix of American and British words and (officially) we mostly use British spelling, which I tend to prefer. However, there are some outliers. For example, "gaol" is one of those words that I only find in older British texts.

How did such a divergent spelling ever come to be? Here's the explanation given by THE SPECTATOR:

Those who love the spelling gaol, which combines characteristics of being very English yet outlandish, might be surprised to find that the Oxford English Dictionary prefers jail. There is a logical explanation.

Both spellings derive indirectly from the Latin cavus, ‘a hollow’, from which came Latin cavea, ‘a dungeon or cage’, and thence French cage and Italian gaggia (like the coffee machine). The changing of cavea into cage is paralleled by the Latin salvia developing into sage, or the late Latin rabia into rage. So far, so good.

But from the Latin diminutive caveola came two different forms in Old French: gaiole or gayole in Northern French and jaiole in Parisian French. So by the Middle Ages, English possessed two forms of the word: gayol, or the striking variant gayhole; and jaiole or jaile. It should be realised that the form gayol was pronounced with a hard g. In the spoken language, the form with a soft g triumphed. Nevertheless, in writing, thanks to legal language and official conservatism, the spelling gaol was preserved, even though everyone said ‘jail’ when they read the word aloud. In America, official documents favoured jail, which is why it still seems to us American, although the pronunciation, derived from Parisian French, was identical on both sides of the Atlantic.

[dancj]

That "sweetcorn" confuses me, because corn isn't exactly sweet.

It's quite sweet.

So much so that in Asia (China or Thailand - can't remember which) I've seen Sweetcorn flavour ice cream and chewy sweets.

[Tuck]

[*]corn--meaning any kind of grain and not actually the corn you eat on the cob

Technically 'corn' is the staple crop in a given area. Somewhere along the line we just began using it interchangeably with maize, at least in North America.

[Jim Kelly]

Technically 'corn' is the staple crop in a given area. Somewhere along the line we just began using it interchangeably with maize, at least in North America.

Well, sure, I know that now. But all those years ago when I first read THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE it was a real head-scratcher.

And I remember all those ads in the 1970s for Mazola Corn Oil, where a Native American actress would say, "You call it corn, we call it maize."



But I think that was a load of bologna. The etymology I find for "maize" says that this is a word by way of Spanish from the Arawakan language--the Arawak being the indigenous people in the Caribbean. But that's just one native language group--and the Americas have more language families than anywhere else in the world, so it's unlikely that there would have been one shared word for corn among all those hundreds of nations, speaking completely different languages. For example, the translation I get for "corn" or "maize" is "Ixi'im" in Yucatec Maya (the language of the Mayan people in the Yucatán Peninsula).

In fact, when I did botany at university, my thesis paper was on corn (aka maize) and its wild origins in the Americas as teosinte.

[Tuck]

Yeah, well, the "Crying Indian" in those old anti-litering ads was Italian.

Ads are big fat lying liars.

[Jim Kelly]

I was watching something on youtube about expressions like "thank you" and "you're welcome" and they said that it's a generational thing with "no problem" vs "you're welcome."

It does bug me a lot when I'm at a Starbuck's and I get "no problem" or "no worries" in return for my "thank you." But just this morning, I was in line at the supermarket and I saw that the guy behind me only had a few items, so I said he should go first. He said "thank you" to me twice and both times I said, "no problem."

So am I inconsistent?

I think, for me, "no problem" is conversational. But when I'm at a cafe, paying a server, or in a store, buying from a clerk, it's a different situation. This is a transaction. To some extent I was putting myself out for the guy at the supermarket, but I wanted to indicate that I was not so put out, so it really wasn't much of a problem for me to let him go ahead. None of that context is involved in a transaction.

And I feel slighted when the server says "no worries" because that's not what the situation is about--he's being paid to serve me and I'm thanking him as a courtesy, and he, as a courtesy, should say "you're welcome"--because I am welcome to this service. I'm not saying "thank you" because I'm worried about the problems I'm causing him by taking him away from his personal interests to attend to the job he's being paid to do. By saying, "no problem," you're saying that sometimes it is a problem to do your job but this time it was no problem for you--and that subverts my reasons for saying, "thank you."

But it's not so much the server that says "no problem" that annoys--it's whoever first introduced this convention into the language. If they really wanted to replace "you're welcome" with some other expression, they could have come up with something more apt for the transaction, like "it's a pleasure" or "by all means."