When someone asks, "Do you remember your PIN?", I'm thinking about sewing needles or medallions for a second -- if they didn't add the word "number". On the other hand, the acronym ATM is so common that I don't feel the need to say "ATM machine" anymore; I'll say "Where's the nearest ATM?" and expect that most people will immediately understand it without having to think about what it stands for.

To me it does, it's irritating, like "to go up upstairs" (“monter en haut”). But most people evidently don't care, journalists do it all the time now.

I think it comes down to familiarity with expressions (or acronyms), as you explain. The more you internalize what a conjugate thing is, the more it becomes its own — and grammar be damned on the way, as logic evidently isn't the only path to understanding/speaking (perhaps not even the most common).

Monter en haut: to go up (not specifically stairs, contextually maybe, could just as well be an elevator or a tree house ladder for example)

Monter a cheval: to get on a horses back

Monter un meuble: to assemble furniture (think ikea)

The noun here is not irritating, it’s essential.

Also, there are proper ways to say “monter en haut”! — monter à l'étage, monter l'escalier, monter dans sa chambre, etc.

Speaking of which, I find that it's particularly important to speak properly around kids, it reinforces good logic, thoroughness I think. My parents were like that, I've always been like that, and I guess I'll do the same to my kids, haha.

thanks your majesty, queen of fuckin england was it, yea?

you can acronym "on s'en fout" as osef for a general "no one cares" and then rebuild osef as a verb : "je m'osef", "tu t'osef" etc...

reflexive

At least in Germany/German language, if you use such a redundant wording, you are often considered to be not very knowledgeable. In the 90s, some people even loved to point out that SMS is the name of the service - the message is an SM (oh, the funny puns that can be constructed from this fact).

No, we use it to emphasize that what we're talking about is as of today, but we can't make projections on the future.

You would use it in a sentence like : au jour d'aujourd'hui there are 'only' 300 deaths from the Chinese virus (implying that you don't know if it's going to get much worse or not).

But I'm sure the French are not the only ones to elevate some bad grammar/style to a level of consensus. Proof that languages are living things!

http://www.acronympolice.org/

http://www.acronympolice.org/?page_id=90

>3.2 Multiple Repeat Violations: A section 3 paragraph 2 offence occurs when multiple redundant acronyms are used in the course of a conversation. An example of a section 3 paragraph 2 violation would be “Honey, what is your PIN number, I need to take some money out of the ATM machine. If I have to go into the bank, they are going to ask for my SSN number and I can’t remember it”.

It varies from community to community. Some say it all the time, others laugh as soon as someone says it, and everything in between.

It's not like "RIP in peace"

This is typically known, even among french people, to be extremely bad french, so it is pretty much only used by ignorant journalists.

Wiktionary[1] says that the expression has existed at least since the 18th century, adding this interesting note:

> À noter aussi que durant ce siècle, la notion de « lumière » était une représentation métaphorique de la « connaissance » (cf. : siècle des lumières). Cette expression peut donc aussi se traduire de la façon suivante : « à la connaissance d’aujourd’hui » ou « au savoir d’aujourd’hui ».

Roughly translated it says that light could be used metaphorically to imply knowledge, so "au jour d'aujourd'hui" could be parsed like "to the light of today" and from there "to the knowledge of today". Now whether that's a justification after the fact or the real origin of the expression, who knows...

[1] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/au_jour_d%E2%80%99aujourd%E2%...

The same thing happens in Spanish ("subir arriba" and "bajar abajo"). It became a serious pet peeve after someone pointed it out to me, until I noticed that people only make this "mistake" in either very noisy places or very time-sensitive situations. It's more a desired redundancy (even if not conscious) than the accidental redundancy in the case of au jour d'aujourd'hui.

Writing about this reminded me of how some people will try and make conlangs that compress as much information into as few sounds as possible, only to render them unusable - whereas within a rounding error all natural languages have the exact same information density and Signal To Noise ratio.

Edits: grammar, formatting.

"I climb up" might give a somewhat better impression of how "je monte en haut" sounds in French, although I suppose that you can very much "climb down" in English so it's not a perfect match.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

Pet peeve of mine, there also was the word "sociétal" used instead of "social". Which led me to use the locution "les réseaux sociétaux" because fuck.

Society is opposed to private, fragmented circles ("some" audio engineers, "some" people), subset communities contained in society. Externally, society as opposed to other societies i.e. countries or cultures.

Then one day some r/Iamverysmart self-proclaimed intellectual heard "societal" and liked the word, emotionally, and began using it — that's how you learn words, right? By using them. Trial and error.

So, so many errors.

But others liked it too. And ever more. Lovely errors. And suddenly because people confused it with "social", it began an "umbrella concept" for "everything involving many people doing stuff together". Sure, that works for society and social matters. It's also as empty a concept as you can make. But in the Twitter age, it's OK to use 1 word to mean 20 things and never detailing any of it,

because fuck.

Agreed.

The truth is so few people care, it's not even worth the time to delete -et-. Those who do care, speak with others who understand, and ignore the rest. Sad state of affairs, but I've grown convinced it's just human nature, and has been virtually forever.

[1] https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsoc_0035-2969_1991_num_32_4_4079

Hence why we say sécurité sociale et non sécurité sociétale.

jusqu'a maintenant = to this day

au jour d'aujourd'hui is just too awkward to use, it even sounds bad.

I wouldn't say that, it's still debated whether it's correct or not.

Similarly you have "les choses que l'on voit" and "les choses qu'on voit" with the "l'" being there for prettyness.

All of these work and sound more natural in spoken language if you flip and say C'est quoi ? C'est qui ? C'est quand ? etc.

Even though you hear people say "au jour d'aujourd'hui" it's considered incorrect and should be avoided [1]. It's better to say "A ce jour".

[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francai...

Il est tout à fait regrettable d'oublier non seulement la répétition comme outil de communication mais aussi de l'employer de travers à des heures de grande écoute.

I agree that repetition for emphasis is an innovation of modern French though. English for instance would never ever do something like that. That would be completely, entirely, absolutely preposterous. I myself wouldn't stand for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless

Or one that absolutely drives me nuts:

"A great rate of speed"

Which is a journalist way to say "I failed high school physics, but I'm still going to try to sound smart".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative

In which journalists use the passive voice to excuse, e.g., police shootings. "The victim was shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting." Rather than: "the officer shot and killed the victim."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14mistakes.htm...

really threw me off when learning French. I went from the mostly benign and spelling-only prescriptivism of Spanish to the complete and utter anarchy that is English to this weird situation French is in where it's the worst of both worlds: it has all of the rules and all of the exceptions.

In some situations following all of the rules ('course a pied' over 'running' type stuff) will make you positively odd, and in others ignoring some specific rules makes you sound uncultured.

I dislike "Au jour d'aujourd'hui" because of the redundancy. There are shorter and more elegant ways to say the exact same thing. I don't know if we can talk about prescriptivism in that case. It just gives a negative impression on the author (like when you see an anti-pattern in computer code).

It's among the jokes of uneducated French supposedly using "comme même" (like though) instead of "quand même" (even though).

meuf is indeed very much used but not very elegant. More gopnik/low-class style :)

"Comme même" is just a spelling mistake. Kind of similar to "he is better then that".

By comparison, in an English negation you would just have not without any supporting word at the end.

- je ne marche _pas_ (I not not walk _any step_)

- je ne me bat _guerre_ (I do not fight _any war_)

- je ne coud _point_ (I do not sew _any point_)

And then slowly disconnected. All those words are still used as negations, and I cannot think of any word of negation that cannot be interpreted this way, so that might be true (but I cannot really think of more than those 3 either). What makes me doubt is what words would have persisted (why _ step_ as the one most common?)

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cycle_de_Jespersen

Also according to Wiktionary, "guère" is unrelated to "guerre" (war) and "ne ... guère" is therefore not the product of a Jespersen's cycle.

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gu%C3%A8re

It merely means I do not walk. There's no particular connotation. It has absolutely nothing to do with pas as in a step.

> - je ne me bat _guerre_ (I do not fight _any war_)

Je ne me bat guère means "I hardly fight". No relation to war.

> - je ne coud _point_ (I do not sew _any point_)

Je ne couds point means "I don't sew". Again, no particular connotation. Point means the same as pas in this case and has nothing to do whatsoever with stitches.

"Pas" as in the negation originally came from "pas" as in a step, through expressions like "I will not walk another step".

This is not 'guerre' here but 'guère', which is a homonym but has no relation to 'guerre' (war). 'Guère' comes from an old French word that means 'a lot'.

Taking this into account it is clearer that "je ne me bat guère" means "I don't fight much"/"I hardly fight".

You could have picked any verb instead of 'to fight'. I suspect your other examples are equally contrived.

Je mange pas ça - I don’t eat this.

Also the second part can add nuance to the negation, fe.

Je ne mange plus ça - I don’t eat this anymore.

*Not a native speaker so there’s definitely more to it than I know.

The adverb "dónde" already has the preposition "de" embeded in it, as it comes from a condensation of Vulgar Latin "de unde", already meaning "from where". But Latin "unde" already is a composed form meaning "from where", and where the "-de" ending is not the preposition "de" but it's still a particle making "unde" a composed form...

So if you're Spanish and ask "¿De dónde?" you're asking

¿(from (from (where from)))?

It doesn't. Try to explain without handwaving. You can't. The so called experts you are parroting don't actually know. Bet you didn't even know.

It obviously means the day of he', here, the hey day.

> hui evolved from "hoc diem"

that's the mos'stu'ing I ever heard.