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Post by sprite on May 11, 2023 3:58:40 GMT -5
Isn't it? Maybe "super common" is an overstatement, but it's definitely more common than here, where no one says it unless they are very, very angry, whereas I've heard people just say it in humor there (or in songs etc). Yeah, I was thinking it's sort of a gendered/class swear. I hear City-bro types using it with each other, I hear people who 'look' more working class using it, football fans. I hear Scottish/Irish men using it in almost an affectionate way in the phrase, "ya daft C---" but again, not middle class men, not women.
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Post by lillielangtry on May 11, 2023 4:02:46 GMT -5
I would never say it ;-)
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Post by sprite on May 11, 2023 4:54:23 GMT -5
Fah fah too clah-see, yah.
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Post by Liiisa on May 11, 2023 5:02:21 GMT -5
"ya daft C---" -- exactly, that sort of humorous use.
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Post by snowwhite on May 11, 2023 7:08:19 GMT -5
As sprite says, it might be commonly used, but only by particular sub-sets of men really.
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Post by scicaro on May 13, 2023 11:47:33 GMT -5
Talking of shit, this made me chuckle.
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Post by Liiisa on May 13, 2023 11:55:18 GMT -5
Love that. I've never heard anyone say "ratshit" - I guess that's a UK thing?
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Post by vinnyd on May 13, 2023 15:47:38 GMT -5
Hereabouts, chickenshit more often means trivial, not worth paying attention to, than cowardly. Caca di mosca, they say in Italian (fly rather than chicken).
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Post by Liiisa on May 13, 2023 16:46:02 GMT -5
Really? I think of "chickenshit" as maybe not cowardly - that's a little strong - but maybe an insulting term for someone who's risk-averse.
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Post by vinnyd on May 14, 2023 7:55:35 GMT -5
Can be either. Maybe there's a generational difference.
Merriam Webster:
chick·en·shit ˈchi-kᵊn-ˌshit 1 usually vulgar : PETTY, INSIGNIFICANT 2 usually vulgar : weak and cowardly chickenshit 2 of 2 noun 1 usually vulgar : the petty details of a duty or discipline 2 usually vulgar : COWARD, CHICKEN
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Post by sprite on May 14, 2023 16:00:09 GMT -5
Now, now, everyone knows that 'chickenshit' is the adjective of choice for poltroons.
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Post by Liiisa on May 14, 2023 16:09:06 GMT -5
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Post by romily on May 15, 2023 3:38:48 GMT -5
Today’s moan – singular vs plural used by native British speakers. As in a message I just received – “There is three boxes on the shelve”. Are! There are three boxes! I swear, there a days When I want to bury my head in my hand the way the English language is bastardised by supposedly educated people, and it makes me wonder what / if any grammar is thought in school here at all.
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Post by Queen on May 15, 2023 3:52:54 GMT -5
Today’s moan – singular vs plural used by native British speakers. As in a message I just received – “There is three boxes on the shelve”. Are! There are three boxes! I swear, there a days When I want to bury my head in my hand the way the English language is bastardised by supposedly educated people, and it makes me wonder what / if any grammar is thought in school here at all. For a long time there was a fashion in English teaching not to teach grammar. There was a fashion for letting language evolve - which I do agree with up to a point - and grammar was not taught. The only reason I got my head around English grammar is because I learnt other languages at school. (Also... the singular is shelf, the plural is shelves.)
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Post by Liiisa on May 15, 2023 5:09:49 GMT -5
I'm on the fence about grammar and proper speech and all that. If you're writing a paper for a scientific journal, the grammar has to be correct according to educational conventions because if the writing is unclear then you've missed the entire point of the exercise. But if it's a person speaking in a dialect that sounds like English but has its own grammar or a slang that is playing with conventional grammar, I rather like it; makes life interesting.
I had an analogous conversation with my mom yesterday that she was driven to distraction by a Black weather presenter on TV who pronounces "clouds" as "clouts" and got into an interesting argument about what why we would expect everyone on TV to sound like us when there are lots of different kinds of people in the world, any of whom might be qualified to present the weather in the manner of speaking of their community.
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Post by romily on May 15, 2023 5:11:18 GMT -5
Double poke my eyes out!
I guess that might explain why people from here are so crap at learning another language with no understanding of any grammar. But seriously - we are talking singular vs plural, nothing complicated!
We started to learn grammar in primary school - I still remember colouring in verbs and nouns (even though age appropriately they were called "doingwords" - Tunwoerter and "name words" - Namenswoerter.
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Post by Liiisa on May 15, 2023 5:13:34 GMT -5
lol I never was taught English grammar (such confession was much to the horror of my boss, after I'd been copyediting his team's work for 10 years or so). I learned grammar terms from taking French and Latin.
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Post by jimm on May 15, 2023 6:57:25 GMT -5
I don't think my kids were taught English grammar at school (in the '80s and '90s) either.
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Post by ozziegiraffe on May 15, 2023 7:51:50 GMT -5
The principal of a school I worked at insisted I attend a grammar training day with the rest of the staff, even though I don’t teach. After realising that I knew more than the presenter, he relented on future training. He is about ten years younger than me.
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Post by Queen on May 15, 2023 8:24:32 GMT -5
But seriously - we are talking singular vs plural, nothing complicated! There's a regional variation of British English that uses 'was' instead of 'were' in some constructions. "We was sat there for hours" It's grammatically incorrect, but an acceptable local construction in spoken English. For sure I would correct it in a written text that was going to go on a website but for sure not in a conversation. On language variation - the wonderful Reginald D. Hunter.
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Post by sprite on May 15, 2023 8:59:31 GMT -5
"There is three boxes on the shelve”" Yeah, regional grammar. But also mildly irritating. Which is funny, as other 'non-grammaticaly' dialect things don't bother me at all.
This weekend, I was in a lift that featured a North-West English accent.
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Post by romily on May 15, 2023 9:19:45 GMT -5
Not usually used here in the south east. Singular is singular and plural is plural - I think that's more a thing up north?
Anyway, stop with your "language is fluid" stuff - I'm GERMAN - language is an exact science, what is right or wrong can't just be moved around and changed without a big committee of people debating for 20 years!
joking aside - we were literally thought there is a right and wrong way of saying things - and I guess that's the only way you can start to learn a language - and I am still rather "snobbish" and inflexible about it.
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Post by sprite on May 15, 2023 9:27:47 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that if a person is communicating with people who aren't of their dialect, it's counterproductive (and rude) to refuse to use the 'standard'. I think the UK has the added problem that dialect says a lot about class and education.
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Post by vinnyd on May 15, 2023 9:45:37 GMT -5
There are plenty of USAnian dialects in which "There are" does not exist. There's lots of them.
And others in which you would use "It" instead of "there" in sentences like that. "It's three boxes on the shelf." Or maybe with what they call copula deletion: "It three boxes on the shelf."
Getting upset that people speak their native dialect of English is like getting upset that the French speak French.
(It doesn't mean that I am going to hire somebody for a public-facing role among educated people who speaks like that, or vote for them for high office. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over it if I overhear it on the bus.)
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Post by psw on May 15, 2023 10:01:18 GMT -5
Re: poor or non-existent grammar instruction in U.S. schools:
I used to teach Russian. The daughter of a friend was having trouble learning Russian in high school, so friend hired me to tutor her. Russian, unlike English, is a highly inflected language, and the daughter was having a very hard time with the nouns. Turns out she'd never learned the difference between and direct and an indirect object in English, so of course she could not make the distinction in another language either - for starters. I explained this to my friend, who was appalled that our town's supposedly excellent school system had this huge deficiency.
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Post by lillielangtry on May 15, 2023 11:02:43 GMT -5
There are also occasions when German and English treat singular and plural differently. German tends much towards strict grammatical number agreement, whereas English looks more at the meaning.
For example, if I wrote "A group of people were discussing which table to sit at", many Germans would correct that. Ahem, it's A group, ONE group, they would say - singular, so it must be "a group was". But as we know, in English it's rather more fluid than that and collective nouns with various members are often treated as plural - officially accepted in style guides and all.
German also refers to things like amounts of money and percentages as plural, which I for one do not (always) do in English if I'm referring to a collective sum. Also countries with a plural name, like the USA or the Netherlands, are always plural in German and not in (modern) English.
Plus, of course, GB and US differences like whether you refer to a sports team or a company as singular or plural.
If only language didn't keep getting more complicated the more you look into it!
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Post by Liiisa on May 15, 2023 11:38:17 GMT -5
British and US English treat plurals differently! For example (if I’m correct), I’d say “Radiohead is playing in DC tonight” but in the UK it’s “Radiohead are.”
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Post by lillielangtry on May 15, 2023 11:43:44 GMT -5
Yup, that's true
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Post by vinnyd on May 15, 2023 15:17:21 GMT -5
And even, on the sports pages, "England triumph" or as the case may be "England go down to defeat." I always do a double take. It's "There'll always be an England," isn't it? Not "There'll always be any number of England."
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Post by Liiisa on May 15, 2023 16:14:40 GMT -5
lol vinny
I've gotten used to it, but yes
PS sorry lillie I just noticed that you'd already mentioned the US/GB plural thing, mea culpa
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