MZ/MuZ Riders

It's pretty much the same for everyone. I think that the 'english' language is deteriorating... slowly. Urban dictionary is filled with ridiculous phrases.

mdouglas71 wrote:I think that the 'english' language is deteriorating... slowly. Urban dictionary is filled with ridiculous phrases.

One could argue that English isn't actually a language as such. It's more of a repository for the trawlings of everyone else's languages that sound good at the time. I can't think of any other language that so readily assimilates verbal flotsam and jetsam - and then trots it out a few years later as "new additions". 50% of 'English' is French for starters ......................

Calling English a language is like sticking extended forks and twin megaphone exhausts on a Skorp (mainly by dint of sneaky welding) and calling the resulting bodge a chopper!

I can't think of many languages that do not assimilate worlds from other languages!

therealche wrote:I can't think of many languages that do not assimilate worlds from other languages!

You're right of course - up to a point. But the point I'm making (tongue in cheek in case you hadn't guessed) is that English is amazingly rapacious in its gobbling up of any passing vocabulary that takes its fancy. It's a scavenging crab among languages - a verbal black hole that doesn't care where it gets its next meal. Not only that, once English snares its latest juicy titbit it then, usually, proceeds to mangle it out of all recognition so that even its own parents wouldn't recognise the resulting verbiage. The result is a mishmash of bastardised and intertwined foreign terms that create a nightmare for teachers of spelling (how d'you pronounce "ough" in English then? Tough? Through? Bough? Cough??)and a source of constant amusement for old geezers like me for whom its a second language (thank goodness).

Contrast this with, for example, French. The French (or 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' as the English so delightfully call them) actively resist people tampering with their language. I had my wrist slapped numerous times for using modern slang terms in public - innocent phrases like "Je voudrais prendre une Hamburger, s'il vous plait". Cue much tut-tutting from the next table ....... Apparently it's NOT a "Hamburger" - it's a "Steak Haché" - and the stiffly indignant young Frenchwoman who put me right on the matter left me in no doubt that if I was going to live in her country then I should speak her language properly, with none of the foreign muck added.

French kids, by and large, are proud of their ability to speak elegantly and write what they speak. Contrast this with several weeks later when we came back to the UK for a brief family visit, and were confronted at Reading Station with hordes of indigenous English kids talkin' a weird gangsta' dialect with their "Homies" and soundin' like dey wuz all from Jamaica ..... When the heck did "Me want ..." come to supplant "I'd like .... please"? And what the hell does "I's gonna smack up ma bitch if she diss me again mon" mean ..........

So, my point is that English is, effectively, the shitehawk of the word-world. It'll eat whatever's passing, edible or not, and then craps it out when it's digested it. It's called 'Guano'.

I think it's time to move abroad again just on case it's contagious............


EDIT: This is (apparently) English .......... http://www.lyricsfreak.com/i/ill+bill/g ... 06697.html

I think you will find that it was my colonial cousins who coined the "cheese eating surrender monkeys"!

Damn! That's just plain sneaky!