Is vocabulary important?

[Eric]

"Headed" or "heading" towards something? The Brits say the latter, the Americans the former. Neither is "right" in absolute terms, but we don't need to copy one another just to accentuate the "special relationship".

[Eric]

I keep getting the feeling that "shot to death" is not the same as "shot dead". Obviously, the victim ends up in the same state, but I feel there is a nuance of a difference.

I feel that "shot to death" implies several shots being shot, maybe by several people, until death ensues, and this may take some time. On the other hand, "shot dead" means one or a few shots, with the victim dying almost instantly.

What do the rest of you think?

[Loki]

I keep getting the feeling that "shot to death" is not the same as "shot dead". Obviously, the victim ends up in the same state, but I feel there is a nuance of a difference.

I feel that "shot to death" implies several shots being shot, maybe by several people, until death ensues, and this may take some time. On the other hand, "shot dead" means one or a few shots, with the victim dying almost instantly.

What do the rest of you think?

Also, structurally speaking, "shot dead" gives the impression of something quicker than "shot to death", which is longer and it takes more time to pronounce but also to put into action, so to say.

[Eric]

My analogy is "beaten to death" which implies a long process, versus "beaten dead" which we simply do not say, as beating implies a series of blows.

[liehtzu]

The phrase Old Masters is sexist, authors and students are told - Telegraph[/URL]

Eric, I think you've done it. You've posted a link to the single stupidest thing I've ever read.

Reading this and not knowing - to laugh? to cry? - made me think of a book I just finished a few weeks ago, Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left of It, which I'd never heard of before I happened across it at the spare little library at the Foreign Information Center here in my Japanese city. The book articulated a lot of what's been on my mind the last few years about so-called cultural relativity (the assumption among academics that there is no such thing as "high" and "low" culture, that Star Trek is just as valid a subject for study as Shakespeare), and how it's tied to social decay. The banning of words, the constant white-washing, the constant need to scrutinize what you say or print (Can "white-washing" be construed as racist?), the turning of language into linguistic muck - well, see George Carlin's standup routine on the evolution of the term "shell shock."

The book's worth a gander even for those who may disagree with its central theses which are, for those who consider themselves the more liberal among us, indisputably of a conservative slant. But I think one ought to re-assess one's values and suppositions now and then - one might find the unpleasant but necessary truth that some of those dearest values and suppositions are constructed from shoddy material indeed.
And for those with a hearty sense of humor the title of the book, as well as the cover photograph, is worth the proverbial thousand words:

http://bloophynix.files.wordpress.co...11/culture.jpg

[Eric]

That article is from 2008:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-are-told.html

It is rather amusing. Why don't they say "Old Masters and Old Mistresses" instead?

As for conservatism with a small "c", it doesn't do anyone any harm to conserve or preserve the good things in society.

I'll look out the Dalrymple book next time I'm near a bookshop here in Sweden that has a good selection of English-language non-fiction.

In Sweden, there is a term "finkultur" meaning "fine culture" in the same way that "fine art" in English suggests something refined. The problem is that it tends to suggest that what I would call simply "culture" is too refined (for snobs only), so that culture must include a lot of other things such as cookery, fashion, and so on, to make it palatable to all. This leads to the watering down of the word "culture".

[Loki]

This morning a woman at the supermarket asked me what was the difference between "vocabolario" and "dizionario" (vocabulary and dictionary), because her son had said to her that he specifically needed a "vocabolario", not a "dizionario". I said that it was exactly the same thing, (I had already checked them on my dictionary). Now, in Italian they are pretty the same thing, and the definitions are very similar; however, while a "dizionario" is just the book where you can look up words, a "vocabolario" corresponds also to the English word "vocabulary", that is:

1. all the words that a person knows or uses;
2. all the words in a particular language;
3. the words that people use when they are talking about a particular subject (medicine, linguistics, etc.). (OALD)

In English there seems to be a preference to call the book "dictionary", although the fourth meaning of "vocabulary is "a list of words with their meanings, especially in a book for learning a foreign language". I tend to go with the English in this case, since we can basically choose. Surprisingly enough (for me), my big dictionary is called "Vocabolario della lingua italiana".

[Eric]

Occasionally, we use the word "lexicon" if it is a specialised dictionary, and "glossary" if it is only really an extended list of not many pages. "Vocabulary" is used as an uncountable in the three meanings mentioned by Loki. I think that using the word to mean a list of words, therefore suggesting that the word can be used as a countable, is inaccurate.

[Eric]

In the newspaper I read a rather serious article dealing with terrorism. This is headline:

New underwear bomb plot 'proof of al-Qaeda's perverse lengths'

Is the journalist talking about the length and warmth of thermal underwear by any chance?

[Eric]

Here's a bit of German for you, from today's German press:

Ein Kontinent wankt – Die Angst vor der Euro-Dämmerung

Say no more... Never mind Wagner's Götterdämmerung. This is the Dämmerung of Onan.

[Liam]

Can you enlighten those of us who don't speak this ugly barbaric language please? Does the phrase mean "the continent's fucked"? How charming. And so TRUE.

[Aldawen]

Can you enlighten those of us who don't speak this ugly barbaric language please?

Hey, it's neither the one nor the other - at least for me and compared to English *gg* Not only is the German pronounciation far more consistent than the English one, apart from that German is much more flexible when it comes to word ordering in sentences thereby changing the emphasis in it. You should admire this language

But to answer your question although it loses meaning because of the associations with "Götterdämmerung" called by "Euro-Dämmerung" as Eric already said:
A continent totters - Being afraid of the Euro nightfall

[Eric]

Some of us are so incredibly sophisticated that we have learnt the language of Thomas Mann, Dürrenmatt, Hesse, Frisch, Rilke, Kafka, Kleist, Jünger, Celan, Trakl, Roth, Broch, Sebald, Goethe, Storm, Musil, Fontane, etc., to a degree where we can at least read a newspaper. German is, of course, a dialect of Yiddish. The fact that some nasty Austrian (whose pronunciation was regional) gave German a bad name is neither here nor there.

"Wanken" in German means to sway when about to collapse, i.e. to teeter or totter; so it has nothing to do with Onan. (If you don't know who Onan was and what he did, you're not educated, and it could be said that you are then a "wanker".)

[Eric]

I'm fed-up of "stunning". It's so overused that people seem to have forgotten that when you get stunned, you get hit on the head - and all your critical faculties are put out of action. Here's a recent one:

It is one of London’s top restaurants, awarded two Michelin stars for its stunning food and lauded by critics for its impeccably smooth service. But last summer the Ledbury in upmarket Notting Hill was invaded by masked rioters armed with baseball bats and bottles who terrorised diners and stole jewellery, watches and wallets, a jury was told.

Petrified customers were forced to kneel on the floor while they were robbed before fleeing to a cellar for safety.

I would have thought that the customers in question were trying to avoid getting stunned by the baseball bats of the robbers. "Lauded" and "slain" are also new-old words that are overused by journalists who think that by snatching at old vocabulary they can brighten up their otherwise fairly boring articles.

[Eric]

Another daft word. Just read: "his wife pre-deceased him". Why can't they just say that his wife died before he did.

[Eric]

Ambiguity can lead to amusement. Like in this headline:

Muslims begin Ramadan fast

Leading to the question: Should Muslims perhaps begin Ramadan more slowly?

[Eric]

Another piece of ignorant language shit from a CNN headline:

Syrian clashes hone in on city of Aleppo

[Eric]

We can't all be speaking the English very welly:

Both promised to coordinate efforts to help the growing numbers of Syrians displaced by the violence within Syria or forced to flee over the border to take refuse in Turkey or other nations in the region.

What a load of rubbish.

[Flint]

forced to flee over the border to take refuse in Turkey or other nations in the region

Take refuse?
A load of rubbish indeed!

[Eric]

Yes, Flint, that was my little pun...