Be Excellent To Each Other

As in his previous book, Does Spelling Matter? (the answer was yes, but not all the time), he is at his best when illustrating how modern usages that horrify linguistic purists in fact have deep historical roots. “OMG” was used by a septuagenarian naval hero, admiral of the fleet Lord Fisher, in 1917: so get over it. Long before Facebook, Thomas More, Shakespeare and Alexander Pope all wrote of people who’d been “un-friended”. Though Tesco was shamed by grammatical purists into altering the wording of its checkout signs from “10 items or less” to “Up to 10 items”, there’s no sound historical or logical basis for such pedantry. (As Horobin points out, the fact that the tills of its upmarket rival, Waitrose, read “10 items or fewer” cleverly confirms its customers in their false “sense of social and intellectual smugness and superiority”).

At any rate, people happily used “less” to mean “fewer” for some 900 years before anybody minded. In 1770, the grammarian Robert Baker suggested that “fewer” would be “not only more elegant … but more strictly proper” than “less” in a phrase like “no less than a hundred.” And that, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, is how the “rule” for using these words was born.

I didn't realise the distinction was (relatively) so recent

It's older than America.

The effect of caffeine affects us all.

I get annoyed by the overuse of the word 'impact'. It's probably because nobody can be bothered to learn the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'. 'Impactful' is even worse.

"The Asda".

These are some good learnings. Can I circle back with you if I have any more asks?

A few weeks ago I was sent a slide deck I was going to present with a colleague. One of the slide titles was "Our Key Asks." You'd better believe I changed that.

People who type "could of" instead of "could have". People who type "are" instead of "our". "The Asda".

All of these should be a paddling.

Right? It's clearly "The A.S.D.As"

'Impactful' makes my fucking skin crawl. Just like 'addicting'.

And 'gifted'/'gifting' in the context 'we're gifting them a toaster for their wedding'.

Also "sunset" as a verb.

I don't think I've ever heard that. What does it even mean to sunset something?

I'm reformed these days. Say what you like.

But there is a special place in hell reserved for those who put a pluralised possessive apostrophe at the end of an initialism that ends in S.

FFS'.

To "sunset" a project is to get it ready to end and then end it, to my understanding.

Sunset typically means "we've not turned this off, but we're not going to do any work on it because it'll be going away soon" - and I'm okay with that, because it kind of makes sense. It's not EOL, but it's almost there.

Ping I quite concur with. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. No part of what ping does bears any reference to what an email does.

Here's a hardy perennial that I don't like because I don't understand it (see also: oh so many things, ha). Favourite shortened to "fav". Eh? Can Dave be written as Dav? Or do people who do that pronounce it as "their fav thing"? Weird.

TTL = ten years if I start eating less pork

Fewer porks

Here's a hardy perennial that I don't like because I don't understand it (see also: oh so many things, ha). Favourite shortened to "fav". Eh? Can Dave be written as Dav? Or do people who do that pronounce it as "their fav thing"? Weird.

No.

You don't get to decide how it's pronounced. Just like the guy who came up with gif doesn't.