Posted on 06/04/2010 8:50:41 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
Plenty, if you want to communicate effectively.
If that constitutes 'progress' to you, so be it. Hate to quote Cicero again, but, as he famously remarked to Catalina, "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?"
As a guess, I should say that that would depend on from whom these assorted Italians are learning English. Wouldn’t you guess that way, too?
The Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox are examples of what this movement tried to impose during the late 19th/early 20th century.
My first thought is “Wouldn’t the idiots just love it if people could no longer read Shakespeare or the King James Bible, not to mention the rest of the Western canon?”
One of your “hads” should be “and.” Thirteenth word.
My second thought is “The dumb-downers are simply getting tired of watching the homeschooled kids win all the spelling bees.”
What kind of loser complains about the difficulty of a spelling bee?
It’s more like puzzles meet the lottery. A kid gets a random word, the definition, alternate pronunciations, etymology of the word, and then they hear it in a sentence.
The contestant may know the word, may not, but usually has enough information to work it out about half the time. In the second to last round, the other girl was one letter off (my guess was the same as hers), using o instead of e since the O is common in words that come from Greek.
I got the winner’s word correct based on etymology also. I don’t think she knew the word, but it was Spanish/Portuguese in origin which is very phonetic and was able to work it out.
If these people had their way, English would devolve into a mixture of Engrish and LOLcat speak.
LOL. I tell my wife’s family in Rhode Island that Florida only has one “r” and it isn’t at the end, i.e. flaw-i-der
I thank the enlich lanegwidge is jest fein the way it is spelt and do not need know correctshun. /sarc
Xena, where Tax-chick had had “has had,” had had “had had”; “had had” had had both the teacher’s and SAJ’s approval.
How’s that?
(I taught English for three years, and my mother and sister are English teachers. It’s in the blood.)
ask becomes axe
Not in my classroom, it didn’t. I got in trouble for not grading Ebonics as highly as Standard English, but “ask” and “ax” are two different words. One is a verb, one is a noun that I would like to bury in the skulls of people who use it as a verb.
Exactly. It has a history. A connection with not only the past but culture.
I axed him and he didn't answer.
So I axed him again.
Spelling has already been simplified to the extreme. Just ask any teenager who texts.
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