Pulled from another thread

[JohnW2]

At school, we were served each day with a 'gill of milk', which was 1/4 pint.

Indeed -since that's what a gill was, and always has been.

My uncle used to 'nip to the pub, for a quick gill', which was a 'swift half'.

... but that's wrong!

 

[SUNRAY]

At school, we were served each day with a 'gill of milk', which was 1/4 pint. My uncle used to 'nip to the pub, for a quick gill', which was a 'swift half'.

Our milk was 1/3 of a pint, the metal crates were marked as 1 gallon.

 

[SUNRAY]

Indeed -since that's what a gill was, and always has been.

... but that's wrong!

my Gill is not ¼pint

 

[JohnW2]

my Gill is not ¼pint

Nor is mine (my wife)

 

[JohnW2]

Our milk was 1/3 of a pint, the metal crates were marked as 1 gallon.

I really can't remember much about it, other than I hated it (particularly when warm, after sitting in crates in the playground for ages) and therefore virtually never drank it, but I suspect it may well have been 1/3 (rather than 1/4) of a pint.

 

[SUNRAY]

Nor in mine (my wife)

My Fiancee of 33 years

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

... but that's wrong!

Yes, but that is what he called it

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

I really can't remember much about it, other than I hated it (particularly when warm, after sitting in crates in the playground for ages) and therefore virtually never drank it, but I suspect it may well have been 1/3 (rather than 1/4) of a pint.

I don't remember it being too warm, but I do remember it in the winter, being icy cold, sometimes frozen, and having to be melted before it was drinkable.

 

[ebee]

I suppose someone being nearly half his age could mean (in this case) half of 55 being 27.5 so the term "nearly" could be plus or minus some small amount , usually we might expect it to mean less than but who says that it can not mean more than?

 

[ebee]

At school, we were served each day with a 'gill of milk', which was 1/4 pint. My uncle used to 'nip to the pub, for a quick gill', which was a 'swift half'.

Is it a local thing Harry? I have no idea how where and when it came about! What about the word "Couple" it means two but how often is it spoken to mean "About Two" therefore perhaps 2 or 3 or 4 even?

 

[EFLImpudence]

I do my best to explain.

I understand what you are saying but I don't understand why you think as you do.

Again, I think you do really understand.
Let me try a slightly different way of putting it ...

In the case of 'use of language', with an 'unregulated' language like English there is not really any 'right' or 'wrong' - all we have is 'common usage'

Except in the instances where you say there are.

. English dictionaries document current common usage but do not 'define' it, and certainly don't introduce changes/'requirements' in terms of how the language is used. I think that most languages are like that (some may be poorly, if at all, 'documented') but I believe that there are at least some (like French) for which the use of the language is 'regulated' and 'defined' by some official body - hence, in those cases, at any point in time there are 'rights and wrongs' (just as with anything else subject to regulation). One should be able to distinguish the two by 'chronology', since the changes in an English dictionary inevitably follow ('lag behind') changes in 'common usage' (and canm never precede such changes), whereas in a regulated language, changes in 'regulations' will usually precede changes in common usage to comply with those changes.

Things like units are highly regulated/defined, by national and international bodies - so in any country (often many/most/all countries) at any one point in time there will be (and must be) explicitly defined 'rights and wrongs'. You surely must agree that it would be crazy (and totally 'wrong') if individuals started using words like pint, litre, gill, pound, kilogram, metre, mile, volt, Ohm etc. etc. etc. to mean something 'wrong' (differing from the universally-accepted definition, hence essentially universally-used) and that such an error ('incorrectness') would simply not be allowed to spread to the point that it eventually became common usage?

Yes I would think that crazy but I also think the other errors are equally crazy and don't understand why you do not.
.

It presumably must have been something like that (as I wrote, seemingly best part of 400 years ago) - but I still find it hard to understand how such a degree of 'incorrectness' managed to 'catch on' to such a degree.

People's stupidity becoming the majority view.

It's a bit like having a situation in which increasing numbers of people came to use the word 'cold' to refer to something with a high temperature, to the eventually extent that it became accepted 'common usage'.

Exactly - so you do agree with me.

The former is an (I would say 'understandable') 'phonetic' thing. Particularly when "have" is abbreviated (to " 've' "),

Even that is not accurate; it should be "'ave"; all people do is drop the 'h' and perhaps pronounce the 'a' as a 'u' or 'o'.

and given variations in voices/accents, verbalised versions of, say, "would've" and "would of" can be so difficult to distinguish that I'm not surprised that some have also come to write it incorrectly.

Irrelevant - whatever the reason the word is still "have" and spelt 'h-a-v-e'.

As for the latter, and as you know, I am as much a culprit as anyone else (I have a habit of using those 'interchangeably'!) - but I agree that both those issues may have been avoided had people (including myself) been repeatedly 'corrected' at a fairly early stage in life.

Hallelujah!

As above, in terms of the English language there is not really any formal 'right' or 'wrong', so really nothing to 'correct' - the mostonec could really do would be to point out that something differed from current common usage.

Yes, you mean wrong.

That's not really an answer to my question. We know that such is not 'what happened' but I'm trying to get you to tell me whether you think that people should have been repeatedly 'corrected' whenever they used English in a manner which differed from what Chaucer (or whoever) would have used it, such that it would have happened, and we would all be speaking and writing "Chaucer's English" today.

Then it's not a valid question.

Had something else happened and we were now speaking differently, then that would be the situation.
How would we know any different?

 

[JohnW2]

I suppose someone being nearly half his age could mean (in this case) half of 55 being 27.5 so the term "nearly" could be plus or minus some small amount , usually we might expect it to mean less than but who says that it can not mean more than?

Yes, that would be possible. However, in the case I mentioned I think the point the headline was trying to make (as confirmed by the actual article's disclosure of her actual age) was that her age was almost ('nearly') 50% less than his.

 

[JohnW2]

I understand what you are saying but I don't understand why you think as you do.

I don't think there's anything more I could do to help your understanding.

Except in the instances where you say there are.

No, not 'exceptions' - they are two totally different things. One is the question of 'use of language'. As I've said, with an 'unregulated' language like English, there is no 'right' and 'wrong' - only 'current common usage'. The other relates to explicit definitions by national/international/whatever bodies. Anyone who uses, say, the word 'kilometre' to refer to something different from what the definition (and everyone else) says that it means is simply wrong.

Even that is not accurate; it should be "'ave"; all people do is drop the 'h' and perhaps pronounce the 'a' as a 'u' or 'o'.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'accurate', since it's a very long-established practice to change (in writing) the "a" to an apostrophe. When it comes to pronunciation, do you really think there is an appreciable difference between the sound of "would hove" and "would of"?

Then it's not a valid question. Had something else happened and we were now speaking differently, then that would be the situation.
How would we know any different?

You continue to evade the question, now by saying that it is "not valid".
As I've written umpteen times before, you seem to regard as 'magic' the point in time when you first learned the English language. You seem to believe that any subsequent changes in English as spoken at that point in time should have been regarded as 'incorrect', and hence 'corrected' to prevent them coming into common use, but you seem to totally ignore the changes that had gone 'uncorrected', allowing the language to evolve, over the preceding 1,500 (or whatever) years.
As I've said before, on a much shorter time-scale I would imagine that a fair bit of the English that you were taught, and hence which you regard as (the only) 'correct' language, will (if they thought similarly to you) have been regarded as 'incorrect' by your parents and grandparents.

 

[EFLImpudence]

I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

 

[JohnW2]

I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

I obviously think the opposite.

I would be very interested to hear what others have to say about what I (and you) have been writing about this, and whether they can understand what one or both of us are saying - as well, of course, whether or not they agree with either of us.