Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: How brand-new words are spreading across America

Posted by Arlo Barnes on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-brand-new-words-are-spreading-across-America-tp7586515p7586540.html

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Parks, Raymond <[hidden email]> wrote:

My wife hates "New and Improved" and news-stories about vehicular homicide that state "the car hit the group of children at the school bus stop". The first has been a staple of language comedy - how can something be new and improved at the same time?

 Would it help to think of the phrase as a shortening of "renewed, and improved in the renewal"?

 

Her gripe with the second is that a car (or truck or ...) has no volition - it must be controlled by someone. The driver hit the group of children with the car under their control. This will still be true for autonomous vehicles - even if the passengers in the car have no control (unlikely), the software developers who program the algorithms of the autonomous vehicle will be liable when the car hits the school children - the programmers hit the school children.

No, that is the opposite of what happened - the car physically contacted ("hit") the children, while the driver was shielded from physically contacting the children by the shell of the car, or the programmer from the indirection of the technology.

However, the discussion on how the cause-effect relationship can be parsed as relates to liability in auto-related accidents is a good one, especially amusing is the idea of software-wrangling using the doctrine of the elemental.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

If I *was* should be If I were, subjunctive. Loan is a noun so I can not "loan you something" .. "lend (verb) you something". Less -> Fewer.  It goes on.

 

The was/were thing keeps coming up on alt.usage.english and the English Stack Exchange - it seems like there is not a strong enough grammar in this context for English for there to be a hard-and-fast rule either way; trying to compare English to other languages results in pointless rules like the 'no split infinitives' dogma.

I do not think I have heard people say "I will loan you something", but "I will lend you something" seems like it would be rarer still (that is the usage I favour, however). Sometimes I notice people mix up 'lend' and 'rent', oddly enough.

-Arlo James Barnes 

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