Posts Tagged ‘English’
were kiling english
I’ve had the impression that we’re killing English for a while now, but I usually try to keep quiet about it. As a rule, people don’t like snobs, especially the sort that tell them they are doing things incorrectly. Lately, however, I have found myself reading things on the Internet—mostly comments or blog posts by people, some of whom I very much respect—and noticing an atrocious level of grammatical error.
I was moved to action this morning as I read an extremely perceptive yet error-ridden Facebook note. Granted, that action consisted solely of complaining about the state of things on my Facebook status, but it was nevertheless action:
I’m depressed by the state of the English language as seen online. No capitalization, misspelled words and missing apostrophes (or–worse–apostrophes in the wrong places). Yes, maybe I’m a snob, but this language evolved over thousands of years and we’re killing in a tiny fraction of that. Rapid de-evolution. What can we do?
A Complement to Compliment
Recently when writing a quick note I used the phrase “with complements of.” Only upon re-reading my note (after I sent it) did I realize it should have been “with compliments of.” Curious about this distinction, which I hadn’t even consciously realized existed, I turned to the ultimate authority for clarification.
Evidently the word was originally spelled “complement,” having derived from Latin through French. Sometime between 1650 and 1725, however, the French word “compliment” supplanted the second definition of “complement.” Thus, by the mid 1700s English had developed two different words:
Complement: that which completes or makes perfect
Compliment: polite expression of praise or flatter
Of course those are only two of several definitions of each, which both have noun and verb forms, but they are relatively representative on the whole. Upon inspection, it does seem clear that having two different words is useful here. But that doesn’t change the fact that the French “compliment” staged a hostile takeover of the English language.
