Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

i hate it & it sounds lousy but it's not new

https://imgur.com/9NjtHVa

https://i.imgur.com/9NjtHVa.png

sounds like the kind of word a Cohen bros. gangster would use to sound smarter than he is

― Lil' Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, May 29, 2019 3:26 PM

And "converse" sounds like something a Conehead would do at parties.

suspect was conversing with suspected accomplice in the interior of the vehicle

"chaotic good"
"lawful evil"

all of those ones

So you hate D&D?

So this converse/conversate discussion reminded me of something I dimly remember being taught when I studied Latin as a teenager four decades ago. I’ve tried googling to confirm it but failed (because I don’t quite know what I’m looking to confirm, especially in regard to technical terms). Plus I got a bare pass grade at Latin A-level so my understanding of what I was being told may have been dimmer than my memory…

The gist of it is this: that late latin had a fvckton of newer verbs, 1st conjugation neologisms, which either completely supplanted their classical latin equivalents – or offered subtle but useful variants in meaning.

(“Classical” latin roughly meaning the latin of the republic through to the first few caesars, “late” meaning the latin of the expanded decadent empire — late weird caesars, constantinople in the driving seat, confused dark ages nonsense generally. 1st conjugation is already the most common form — amo, amare, amavi, amatus — with implication that these neologisms arrived in the easiest and most regular column bcz they were a bit cheesy and vulgar and inauthentic…)

Anyway I can’t find confirmation of this as such — anyone who knows more plz to chime in and correct! But I am interested that something similar seems to be happening in 19th-20th C English, either independently, or (imo more likely) as nudged by buried implications in the inherited latin roots and relations.

EXAMPLE ONE (illustrative):
Cano, “I sing”, versus Canto, also “I sing”.

The first is a third conjugation verb, old and simple and solid (it turns up in the very first line of Virgil’s Aeneid) and yet also (inevitably) irregular lol: cano, canere, cecini, cantatum — with participles cantatus, cantata, cantatum.

The second is a 1st conjugation verb. I don’t know if it’s technically late (i.e. I don’t know when it was first recorded in a written document), but it seems largely to be backformed from cano’s participle form: canto, cantare, cantavi, cantatum — with (identical) participles cantatus, cantata, cantatum.

The key point is that that meaning has shifted, or coagulated if you like, round a sense of ritual and social repetition: to sing, to play (roles/music), to recite, to praise, to celebrate, to forewarn, to enchant, to bewitch…

EXAMPLE TWO (directly involved with the converse/conversate thing):
Converto, “I turn”, versus Conversor, “I associate with”.

The first is a third conjugation verb, old and simple and solid, meaning to turn around. It shares a root (verto) with many many different types of noun and verb in Latin and English (inc.verse, reverse, convert, advert and so on): converto, convertere, converti, conversum — with participles conversus, conversa, conversum.

The second is a 1st conjugation deponent* verb, clearly built out of elaborated elements of the first: conversor, conversari, conversatus sum – with participles conversatus, conversata, conversatum. It means to consort/associate (with), to be a constant visitor, to conduct oneself, to behave/act

NOTE: A deponent verb is one that has active forms but doesn’t use them (deponere: “to give up”). Though such verbs occur in passive voice they are translated in active voice. Thus conversor translates not as “I am consorted with” but as “I consort with” (note super-subtle distinction anyway, then switched all around).

CONCLUSION: the move from converse (as in “the suspects were conversing quietly in the corner”) to conversate (“let’s you and me conversate, brother!” — meaning something more like “associate with one another in order cheerfully to shoot the breeze!”, with flavour both african american and distinctly, even floridly mocking of its own fanciness) does seem to me to echo some of the moves in evidence in examples one and two, from a basic, almost stripped-down meaning in classical latin to a social, semi-compulsive and exuberantly repetitive meaning in late latin. But I have no way of knowing if this echo is a matter of the various latin meanings somehow internally shaping the (far later) english usage, OR of the evolution of english simply having a broadly similar dynamic, which is to say adjustment (and backformation) in the face of not-dissimilar social pressures and handy convenience and the vulgar mocking the educated and the great…

mark s that post is both booming and effortlessly summing up the spirit of ILX.

holibobs

holibags > holibobs

(Never heard of holibobs tbh)

never heard of holibags; heard of holibobs from middle-class English people only.

it's hideous and twee but kind of admirably joyful.

It is more likely that those movements in meaning are all illusions. The history of a language is snapshots of a boiling pot. Linguists can tell you how this sort of boiling water tends to behave, but to call it a history is assigning intention and narrative to a system that has none. Language does not evolve, it changes. You can map the changes, but it does not lead anywhere. You're making constellations from stars; the stars themselves are not involved.

Words derived from the Latin root conversāt have been borrowed into English (via French) at multiple points in the last thousand years, and those borrowings have also undergone changes in English (conversate likely being a back-formation from conversation). There is no dynamic there, and any continuity is a metalinguistic observation. Related terms have entered and exited the language repeatedly, some documented and others utterly lost, just as your own set of implicit meanings of all English words will enter and exit the world as you live and die. These borrowings are only additive to the sense of English conver- words in a pedagogical process, these histories are not present in the minds of living speakers saying "converse" or "conversate" or somehow lying dormant in lexemes deep in the mind (however they may be stored). Consider that the very act of using the lens of the meaning "to speak with" both shines a light and casts shadows on landscape of conversāt-derived utterances of the last thousand years. We are projecting a narrative onto a desert landscape and saying we found a trail.

(xp) Holibags seems to be Scottish, and possibly Irish.

xpost damn

Just say "talk."

TS: Scolding people for their annoying non-standard usages, or scolding people for being judgmental about naturally occurring changes to the boiling pot of language

‘Just say "talk,” he grimaced.

Kirsten Gillibrand, bartender at a Des Moines gay bar.

Wrong thread, but appropriate!

well it's not really scolding

Yeah, that was an enjoyable, well-crafted, and stimulating post that wasn't scolding.

Agree it was enjoyable and stimulating. And just a little scolding. Linguistic explanations unavoidably tend to come off that way, or at least sound a bit condescending to those who misguidedly posit human agency.

Conversate in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnK5si4ZQnM

I've talked about the distinction in one of the rolling linguistics threads, but it's sorta a division between explicit and implicit knowledge, two different kinds of learning - native speakers have a large body of implicit knowledge about their language, and don't exert that much agency over those aspects of it. One reason why this thread has over 5,000 responses-even though you may hate a neologism or catchphrase, you often can't stop yourself from thinking it or even using it. Language is an animal thing. Unique (maybe) to us, but animal still. We tend to overexplain language change, because like our own histories, the events are no longer accessible to us. All we have is the narrative. (this is exploratory rambling)

Language does not evolve, it changes. You can map the changes, but it does not lead anywhere. You're making constellations from stars; the stars themselves are not involved.
<3

always good posts about language from f hazel

Evolution also doesn't lead anywhere tho.

it's about the journey

Evolution also doesn't lead anywhere tho.

True, but a common folk belief about language is that it is constantly being degraded by its own speakers and will go to ruin without intervention. The ongoing intelligibility of the language does not ameliorate this worry... it is instead explained away by narratives about past successes with conscious optimization or holding the line against neologisms.

always good posts about language from f hazel

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, June 10, 2019 3:50 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! Great posts F Hazel.

What's up with the way lawyers say "defendant" ending with ANT instead of the normal, unstressed "uhnt"? Speakers do a similar thing when they mention a legislaTORE. I don't know what impression they're shooting for. They annoy the shit out of me.

what is this, a court for ANTS?

To me, "Nailed it" has gone from totally unremarkable to kind of annoying. There's something very buzzfeed-headline about it, at least when it's used in a kind of cutesy enthusiastic way.

boom

'smashed it', 'smashed my gym goals' etc hate hate hate this

yeah, anything like that. smashed it, killed it, bossed it. ugh.

I do kinda like the way slang like this passes through predictable phases as we experience it individually... hearing, understanding, initial use, normal use, ironic use, silent revulsion, violent protest

totally
also the fact that it serves a banal purpose -- in this case, bragging

no one would write "i accomplished my fitness goals today" and then post it but for some reason it's deemed acceptable to write "smashed my gym goals" with an emoji of user's choice

so many items shared could be filed under the even more banal category of "showing off" -- and because "no one likes a showoff" is a perennial truism, we remain annoyed. like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

"nailed it" and "spot on" are both v useful early warnings of writing that's bad and you are better off not reading it

ditto when writing is described as "brilliant" -- ignoring it is living your best life

relatedly https://qz.com/547463/are-you-the-friend-that-everyone-finds-insufferable-on-facebook/

'smashed my gym goals'

Seriously?

smashed my gym goals, workout buddy, car into a stop sign on the way home

"Smashed it" annoys but not "crushed it"? Has "crushed" made it to the acceptably ironic phase?

cremated it

I think actual conversation has the advantage of a blow-softening ephemerality that social media posts definitively lack

if anyone said "spot on" to me in conversation i'd jab my finger in their eye

I also think LL raises a good point, to some extent the nucleus of any social media post is a brag.

my maxim is that ppl go onto social media to boast or complain (hi haters)

social media has always felt to me like answering a question that no one asked, providing more or less unsolicited information.

How about the overuse of "prior" and "prior to" when "before" works fine?

(xpost)
I also like how often slang that has jokey origins so predictably gets stripped of all irony when it passes from an insider group into wider usage. I believe this happened somewhat with "rockist". The most striking recent instance, which you could trace practically in real time, was "Like a Boss". (Granted, SNL is hardly confined to insiders.) Within months of the video showing Andy Samberg doing decidedly non-bosslike stuff, it had passed from mildly self-deprecating popular use to straight up bragging.