Re:A book claims that Americanisms will have absorbed the En...
by 2muchcoffeeman on Friday December 29, 2017 @06:21AM
(#16028903)
Richard Dawkins once tweeted his rule for accepting something new.
If it adds something new to the language, he accepts it. If we already have existing words that do a better job, he rejects it.
This begrudgingly forced him to accept the use of ‘like’ the way teenage girls use it because they don’t mean “this person said”, or “I said”. They mean some more like “this person said something to the effect of”.
Re:A book claims that Americanisms will have absorbed the En...
by rumcajz on Friday December 29, 2017 @08:39AM
(#16029411)
Interesting. One would expect Dawkins, being an evolutionary biologist and father of the concept of meme, to just accept the change. But he probably wasn't speaking of what should or should not be. Rather about what he's doing himself.
Interestingly, while one would expect it to be correlated with political belief (conservatives would want language as it was in good old days, progressives would embrace the change) my personal anecdotal evidence says it isn't.