6.0633 Usages: Caring Less and 'They' (4/71)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 1 Apr 1993 12:02:55 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0633. Thursday, 1 Apr 1993.
(1) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 93 13:44:06 CST (35 lines)
From: Norman Hinton <hinton@eagle.sangamon.edu>
Subject: Re: 6.0631 Rs: Illogicalities; CETEDOC (6/96)
(2) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 93 13:35:42 -0800 (11 lines)
From: blspahr@garnet.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: 6.0631 Rs: Illogicalities; CETEDOC (6/96)
(3) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 20:29:03 -0500 (9 lines)
From: farmstro@epas.utoronto.ca (Frances Armstrong)
Subject: Re: Caring less
(4) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 93 12:59:43 GMT (16 lines)
From: "J.J. Higgins" <J.Higgins@bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: Genderless THEY
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 93 13:44:06 CST
From: Norman Hinton <hinton@eagle.sangamon.edu>
Subject: Re: 6.0631 Rs: Illogicalities; CETEDOC (6/96)
> Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 15:22 EST
> From: "Peter Graham, Rutgers U.; 908-932-5908" <GRAHAM@ZODIAC.BITNET>
> Subject: Re: 6.0622 Illogicalities and Constructions (4/122)
>
>
> Norman Hinton just said (re Constructions):
>
> >"On site" and "in concert" may be unusual constructions in Australia, but in
> the United States they are so common that I cannot even remember having
> heard "on _the_ site" or "in _the_ concert".
>
> I was on the site at the very time that Doris Day screamed out in the
> concert that Hitchcock was filming.
> From: Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries. Sorry.
Yes, I did put that badly, didn't I ? Just to clarify for folks who came in
late, the remark I was responding to was that people (in Australia)
"wrongly said 'in site' and 'in concert' when they meant "...THE...".
So I meant that useage like "Garth Brooks in concert" and "on-site
construction management" are, for better or worse, standard American English
useages.
About "could of" -- it is, of course, a spelled version of the perfectly
normal reduction of "have" which we do not complain about in constructions
like "you've". I guess if people spelled it "could've" (as some novelists
do) there would not be quite such an outcry. But the problem is one of
(quite acceptable) spoken English versus (illogically) non-acceptable writen
English, as is so often the case....
Norman Hinton hinton@eagle.sangamon.edu
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------152---
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 93 13:35:42 -0800
From: blspahr@garnet.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: 6.0631 Rs: Illogicalities; CETEDOC (6/96)
I think we should all be careful about our suggestions for the colloquial
pronunciation of "je ne sais pas" in standard Fr. I still remember the
laughter which ensued from the Alsatian pronunciation of that old
collaborator Pierre Laval, who used to refer to the newspaper "Je suis
partout" as "Je chie partout"! Chez pah, mwa. Blake Spahr
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------25----
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 20:29:03 -0500
From: farmstro@epas.utoronto.ca (Frances Armstrong)
Subject: Re: Caring less
Is the confusion about caring or not caring less connected with the confusing
expression "Would you care to," as in "Would you care to have a
drink?" Non-native speakers sometimes interpret this as meaning
"Would having a drink be a problem for you--would it add to your cares?"
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------31----
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 93 12:59:43 GMT
From: "J.J. Higgins" <J.Higgins@bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: Genderless THEY
I think there is widespread acceptance, in Britain at least, for a
genderless singular THEY in a context like this one:
There's somebody waiting to see you, but they wouldn't give their
name.
This seems normal enough even when the speaker has seen the person waiting
and knows if it is a man or a woman.
J.Higgins@bristol.ac.uk