“We got down from the car and went inside.”

  • wjrii@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Language changes, and if it is used in a way that has any kind of underlying logic that enables communication, then there’s no such thing as “bad” grammar, just more or less popular dialectical choices (though of course at the fringes these can affect how broadly your message can be understood), and signifiers that are more or less prestigious to a given group. Even something as basic as “don’t use double negatives” only makes sense because there are multiple semantic frameworks one could set up around what a double-negative means (e.g. is it a logical negation, a sematic intensifier, or an emotional intensifier?), and it will often, though not always, serve your communication needs better to treat it as a logical negation. Basically, language evolves; communication has a cultural context; don’t be a pedantic dick.

    Almost completely shifting gears, and pulling something tangential from the article, a few weeks ago, I ran across some folks online complaining that they were being enthusiastically served chicken when they’d mentioned they don’t eat “meat.” This snippet from the article helped me clarify how it could be a language issue:

    In Spanish, “carne,” which translates as “meat,” can refer to both all meat, or to beef, a specific kind of meat. We discovered local speakers saying “meat” to refer specifically to “beef”—as in, “I’ll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas.”

    • sangwich@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      In Spanish, “carne,” which translates as “meat,” can refer to both all meat, or to beef, a specific kind of meat. We discovered local speakers saying “meat” to refer specifically to “beef”—as in, "I’ll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas.

      Reminds me of where I grew up, we used “coke” to mean soda/pop. As in, want a coke? Which kind? Coca Cola, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, etc.