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

"Vinilos" in Mexico also

Now that I think about it, it's the countries where you have a word like discos or disques that could mean records or CDs where a word like vinyls is especially useful to make the distinction

CDs are records, I'm firm on this point.

Agreed, the music on a cd was, generally, recorded in a recording studio. A record producer and recording engineer were most likely involved, and probably a record company. Someone probably pressed a button that said "record."

like when people start writing "may" instead of "might," leading to sentences like "The plane may have skidded off the runway" when what they mean is that the plane didn't skid off the runway.

This usage doesn't really bother me, and it's usually clear from context, but my favourite example is "a seat belt may have saved Princess Diana's life".

i have to say the runway example offered strikes me as at least as confusing the other way

theres twenty better ways of saying it that "may have" but "might have" is 19th on that list imo

vinyls is definitely an American English thing too, I hear it constantly from the under-30 set. it's origin is likely just the not-unusual process of a mass noun being used as a count noun. for example, my dad would never tell me that there are beers in the fridge, but my friends do.

same for waters in the fridge
as usual f hazel is otm

i think an important part of the "vinyls" thing is the fact that collecting records has an important community function and also touches on aspects of preserving / passing on musical heritage. and so there's a dynamic of learning from the elders and getting initiated into the lingo and terminology.

"disco é cultura", right?

xxxp Neither "may have" nor "might have" sounds right in that context. "Could have" seems much better to me.

May have = it's still a possibility.

Might have / could have = speculation, with subtly varying degrees of uncertainty depending on the speaker. I am not sure I use them interchangeably, but I would need to listen to myself in a thousand contexts to know.

But "may have" is definitely wrong for Diana's seat belt. Hitler or Elvis MAY HAVE faked their deaths? That implies the possibility that they're living happily together in Bolivia.

Option one: "Diana may have been saved by a seat belt." = we don't know that one didn't. Possibly her death and funeral were a sham and she escaped unharmed, to get away from the spotlight. She is happily retired from working at a day care center in Brisbane, and she has a nice garden.

Option two: "Diana could have been saved by a seat belt." = this is more like, "had she been wearing one, she could have survived, but we don't know for sure."

Option three: "Diana might have been saved by a seat belt." = somewhere in between. You COULD interpret this as a speculation like option one, but that's a stretch. I would be more likely to interpret it like option two, where it means something like, "in an alternate universe where she was wearing a seat belt, there's a chance she would have survived."

i think you sound very certain there about how those very specific meanings are to be derived and i just dont, i suppose, have that confidence in the specifics there

Elvis and Diana are living happily together in Bolivia.

the may be but they might not be

They could have been.

The correct usage is clearly "Diana might coulda lived if she wore a seat belt"

I reckon

people who couldn't find on a map until yesterday

darragh I am simply speaking about how I interpret these phrases in my own dialect and within my own speech community. Yes I have studied linguistics a tad and have a degree in English/philosophy but that's not relevant because I am really just trying to answer the question that was asked.

So:

I may have had sex with your mom: I am not definitively saying whether it happened or didn't, but there is a possibility that it happened. To be honest, we were both pretty drunk.

I could have had sex with your mom: I had the opportunity. But this phrasing tends to indicate that I had the opportunity and declined.

I might have had sex with your mom: who knows? We were both pretty drunk.

I would add that the third sentence, as you pointed out in your earlier comment, can also mean something more like this:

If, at some point in the past, something had gone differently, I might have had sex with your mom. This is a purely hypothetical past-tense scenario, and it's clear from context that I did not have sex with your mom.

That's the one that tends to get confusing when you replace it with "may."

hey all let's get off moms.

cause

If, at some point in the past, something had gone differently, I might have had sex with your mom. This is a purely hypothetical past-tense scenario, and it's clear from context that I did not have sex with your mom.

depending on inflection and delivery and context, "might" functions a number of possible ways i would have said, and surely even a basic imagining of a sitcom-apologetic-hilarious morning after confession "i might have had sex with your mom" illustrates how it very much can mean that it has probably happened.

i know that this is a hilarious american thing btw but in this actual context my mother died under sudden and traumatic circumstances while i was in my early twenties so if the annoyance at my quibbling here is such that this is the example you really want to keep going with, fair enough, but if we could move it to anything else that works too

I'm sorry, darraghmac, please consider my comment withdrawn.

genuinely fine and that stands for all, i know it's no harm meant

i suppose you could say that i might have mentioned it sooner

Sorry dmac, I wish it were clearer that I was not referring to any specific actual mother (nor, for that matter, any specific actual Princess of Wales).

The chosen examples need not, and should not, cloud the grammar discussion.

So if it helps, feel free to substitute something like "boil the pasta" or "mulch the garden" or "toast the bread" or "assemble the Lego figurines" or whatever uncontroversial analogy you think will help move the discussion forward in a productive manner.

its harder to sell a hilarious sitcom apology reading of admitting you boiled the pasta, ill grant u that

We're unlikely to get too much consensus here, because (aside from different English dialects using them differently) modals have some inherent semantic ambiguity, because they deal with intention, permission, desire, hypotheticals, etc. They also have past tense forms that don't express action in the past, are used as polite forms, and other unusual stuff.

We're hyperliterate so we (in vain) attempt to make syntax work entirely free of context, while language was forged during human evolution by context-dependent usage. What makes language amazing is that it manages to maintain both ambiguity and clarity as ideals. Modals are a good example of this.

CTA ('Call to Action') - something that a system user has to do or is requested to do or i don't even know.

CTA makes me laugh because it sounds really URGENT and IMPORTANT but all you're usually doing is asking someone to...click a link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mXIiM9QjA

Going back to the convo about "creatives", I often struggle w/ the fact that there's no good word for being a reader and listener and viewer and gamer, no catch all term for enjoying these things. Consumer is horrible capitalist terminology, audience member is weird outside of specific contexts.

got my first 'revert' today...

From an Irish Broadband company....

might now shop elsewhere.

I had never heard of it till this thread, but my partner has heard it all the time, despite working in the same industry... she thinks its a legal thing that has crept in because people are parroting what a clever person says.

see also using fiscal when its not about taxes....

xxp - some times it's clicking a link and signing a petition!

"Touch grass".

there's no good word for being a reader and listener and viewer and gamer

Aesthete?

Halfway through the Ashes and I am heartily sick of hearing and reading the phrase "for the ages".

okay, we're doing some project at my work around "skilling"

it's a verb based on skill, who comes up with this shit

i know a guy whose last name is skillings.

you'd probably hate him.

would make a skilling off the merchandise

I'm all skilling at my learnings

I do think it's call center lingo, cos most telephony services have to add specific skills for specific types of calls to route to that department, so they talk about "I skilled Jonathan to Retention Services for the evening" etc

well, if I ain't fer it, I'm agin it

"the competition for eyeballs, ears and fingers has never been greater"

"How's you?" Not that I hear this much anymore, except ironically.

"enough about me, what's going on with this whole.... YOU thing?"

"I regret to inform you..." about some mundane thing.

"How's you?" Not that I hear this much any[/more, except ironically.

This appears still to be in use in New York, in particular.

in youse

I don't really like the way that 'rewatch' has become so standard.

It's clearly because 'review' already means something different.

But 'rewatch' still feels to me ugly and a compromise, a substitute word, as just suggested.

I had meant to note something on this thread.

When people (especially artists) say that their success is remarkable as they come from a place.

>>> Cellophane Spoons, the new 4-piece setting Steve Lamacq's programme alight. "Not bad for four lads from Hull!"

I literally saw a Guardian headline recently saying "Not bad for four lads from Sheffield!"

Now, there are cases where this formulation might make sense.

"Winning the Booker Prize? I suppose it's not bad for this former Somalian asylum seeker who fled persection then spent 5 years looked in an Australian detention centre". Yes.

But when the place is simply a location in a rich country of the developed world / Global North, the claim becomes almost meaningless.

Maybe "Not bad from a lass from Orkney" - somewhere implying isolation - OK.

But Hull and Sheffield, for instance, are major cities in the world's 6th biggest economy. They both have established histories of cultural achievement. There is nothing at all remarkable about succeeding when coming from them.

And everyone has to come from somewhere. But still people think that whatever place they came from is the one that makes their success unlikely.

In fact perhaps the most ridiculous case of all was Kingsley Amis: "Not bad from a boy from Norbury, eh?". Norbury is a comfortable suburban area about 7 miles from the UK Parliament.