The official language thread

…and The Rory Award for “The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word ‘Belgium’ In A Serious Screenplay” goes to @Frenzie

Fuck!

(Or is that “Belgium!”?)

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Er, since this is the official language thread, ending sentences with a preposition is frowned upon in English I think to avoid dumb sounding sentences like: “Where is he going to?”
Or “Where is the football at?”

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If you teach people about prepositions instead of avoiding redundancy for stylistic reasons you will end up with nothing but a bunch of zombies claiming there’s something wrong with prepositions.

Ending sentences with prepositions isn’t frowned upon by any expert. Even the awful book by Strunk & White that originated most zombie rules breaks its own evidence-absent rules about things like passives and prepositions constantly.

Of course there is such a thing as situations where you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition for various reasons. The one you mentioned is simply the more general stylistic preference against redundancy. Others are certain noun phrases. “I admired the patience she spoke with” is wrong. But this is an exception to general usage rather than the norm.

Formally speaking you’d often use a formal relative pronoun like which, but even then “for whom is it?” is still plain wrong. “For what did you buy that?” Nope. Just nope.

Somewhere something went wrong and a large contingent of people seems to think the exception with noun phrases is the rule.

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What is the origin of the word neighbourhood then ?
(neighborhood for US) :horse: :pig: :bow_and_arrow: ?

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It’s interesting that you have so many synonyms for that sound a horse makes in English, according to google: neigh, whinny, bray, nicker, snicker, whicker; (archaic) nicher; (rare) hinny
(not counting the few snorting noises…)

We have exactly one for that high pitched hiii-iiih-uuhu sound : hinniken

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Also a Geordie tearm of endearment, usually for females.

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Alreet hinny!

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I hope the grammar police isn’t watching…
Otherwise you should plead “alliterating embellishment”

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:scream: It’s not my fault!! My work browser doesn’t have spellcheck enabled!!

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Yes, this damn A.I.! I have the suspicion that my browser turns the spellchecking randomly on and off in the background. I tell you, this is a conspiration!

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I was distracted enough by the subject matter :wink: I didn’t know ‘hinny’ had that meaning - interesting!

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It might be an idea to specify what is bigger so…

This game is bigger than I thought.

But then it might be better to go with

This game is bigger than I thought it would be.

I didn’t know hinny? that’s a new one to me. I know Pet .

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Where do you call cute girls “birds” is it more a northern or a southern thing?

Well ‘Birds’ was a general thing across the country, but not used much now because women are offended by it. Also gone are ‘Crumpet’, ‘Overtime’ others.

Up north they might call a woman a lass.
In Newcastle, this is a valid sentence: Calm doon man woman!
but most of the country finds Newcastle people hard to understand
(they mainly sound a bit Scottish)

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I used to know a bit Geordie slang, but forgot most of it now since I haven´t spoken to the people I knew from there in about 10 years.

As someone who lives up North, I can confirm this! :smile:

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I was able to understand @tasse-tee’s samples but I assume that she haven’t used slang… :slight_smile:

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