At last, a government minister with some backbone!  Only trouble is, she's French!

... In the 16th century, bespeak acquired another meaning: to order or arrange in advance. It is from that sense that we get the adjective bespoke, referring to clothes and other things that are ordered before they are made.

(In the US "bespoken" means engaged!)

Stircrazy wrote:

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christ wrote:

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... In the 16th century, bespeak acquired another meaning: to order or arrange in advance. It is from that sense that we get the adjective bespoke, referring to clothes and other things that are ordered before they are made.
(In the US "bespoken" means engaged!)

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Interesting...

And now those cretins who write copy for the BBC News web site think "soundtrack" is a verb!  I give up!    Lazy sods! 

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 I don't think I'm quite as against verbing of nouns as you (it's not just a recent largely American and corporate thing, but does have quite a long history), but that use of soundtrack is just appalling.  

Transfer from the Wimbledon men's singles thread - debate sparked by christ's response to Dan Evans's use of "grinded" as the past tense of "grind" in his Daily Fail article about Djoko's chances of winning his eighth title which I thought was worth adding to the archive on here.  I'm going to split it into two parts:

christ:

Surely someone on the editorial staff should know that "He grinded out results" isn't English, even if Mr Evans doesn't.

CD's response:

Ahh, now I know that coffee is ground, not grinded. But I rather like 'he grinded out the win'. I guess it goes with being a 'grinder'. And if you look on The Grammarist site (and some others), they all agree it's not quite right (in UK English) but is very common in a sports context, especially in the US - so I'm going to cut Evans a break

"The verb grind is usually inflected ground in the past tense and as a past participle. Grinded might be considered incorrect in some contexts, but it has grown more common over the past several decades. Its especially common in American sports commentary and writing, where grind means to overcome adversity by playing hard. Based on historical Google News searches, this sense of grinded has been around at least since the 1960s.

And though spell check disapproves of grinded, it is actually not a new word. It has been used historically in various senses (the OED lists a number of examples from the 19th century and earlier), and a Google Ngram suggests the word was more common in the 19th century than it is now. Still, use of grinded seems to have bottomed out in the middle of the 20th century, and it might sound wrong to many English speakers, especially outside the U.S."

And his response to my own comment:

Coup Droit wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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christ wrote:

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Surely someone on the editorial staff should know that "He grinded out results" isn't English, even if Mr Evans doesn't.

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I fear that it may be part of a growing trend influenced by the Yanks, who I believe call a sawn-off shotgun a "sawed-off"!  The only other example I can think of offhand was uttered in the course of a brief interview with Tom Hart Dyke, the owner of Lullingstone Castle in Kent.  His paternal grandmother was Lady Zoe Hart Dyke, who founded Lullingstone Silk Farm (now closed) &, he said, "breeded" her own silkworms to produce the silk!  

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The other common examples are 'spelled' and 'learned' 

There's obviously an aversion to the 't' 

One American friend told me they didn't use 'spelt' because it could get confused with the grain 

In what universe is a sentence with the verb 'to spell' ever going to be confused with a wheat grain?

(Personally, I have no problem with 'spelled' and it's now more common/accepted in English too)

However, the one that really makes me laugh - and it the exact opposite - i.e. suddenly, after all their love of '-ed' endings, the Americans decide to go AWOL - is with the verb 'to dive' 

'He dived into the pool' should be right up the street for our US friends

But no, 'he dove into the pool' 

Where, for the love of God, does that come from?  

ADD: just occured to me, maybe it's a 'drive-drove' thing - maybe I'll forgive them - but it still sounds SO weird 

Shakespeare 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 Grammar-Pedants

The French have the Academie Francais to police the French language, and draw up rules and regs.

The English language gets Bill the Bard, a very naughty boy, illiterate to the point that in 20+ attempts to sign his own name, he never repeated himself.

Adjectives, nouns, adverbs tossed higgledipiggledy hither and thither, the flibbertigibbet. Wrote some mucky bukes about transvestites.

English is the richest language in the history of human thought - it has a demonstrably larger vocabulary than any other, and has incorporated the idioms, thoughts, jokes, greetings and inventions of so many more people (and admittedly some of their idiocies). And it is richer for light-touch policing, and impossible to regulate effectively without a major confrontation with a C17th grammatical anarchist.

French has rules; and the French are perhaps right to consider it a better language for the precise articulation of the complexities and nuances of international diplomacy.

English is brat. Suck it up, mo-fos. It rules because it dont do rules. Defund the police,

christ wrote:

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"mo-fos"?

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To which one might add "brat"...

Stircrazy wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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christ wrote:

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"mo-fos"?

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To which one might add "brat"...

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As ever, I shook my head in disbelief when I read this a couple of days ago.  What's the point of these new so-called "words" if they put up a barrier between those who use them & the rest of the population?  

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 SC, there will be someone saying that with every new word that ever came into being 

It's good that things evolve

In fact, I'm with both wimbledont AND christ here - as in, yes, I love the flexibility of language (English in particular) and I genuinely think that the fact that I have a stomach acid attack every time I see aopstrophes used incorrectly (1960's, say, just kills me) is still compatible with the fact that I think everyone has the right to use language as they like

But I still don't know what 'mo-fos' are