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Post Info TOPIC: The weird & wonderful world of English grammar...


Intermediate Club Player

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The weird & wonderful world of English grammar...


Fun article, SC. Thanks for sharing!

Meanwhile, I'm of the opinion that German is just badly pronounced Dutch. smile (That's because I learned Dutch first but could then understand a lot of German. I did work on properly learning German later on.)



-- Edited by Tanaqui on Saturday 9th of March 2024 12:51:21 PM

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Tennis legend

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



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Tennis legend

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I deplore the current obsession with turning nouns, adjectives & other parts of speech into verbs, but this example extracted from an e-mail sent in 2014, & included in his 131-page witness statement (!), by Rodric Williams, an in-house lawyer with the Post Office, who is being grilled by Counsel to the inquiry into the Horizon scandal, Jason Beer KC, today & tomorrow, just about takes the biscuit!

The vast majority of our agents and other users work with it just fine, and we're not required to bespoke our point of sale accounting system to the whims of each individual agent.

The ignoramus clearly doesn't know that "bespoke" is the simple past tense/preterite & past participle of the now old-fashioned verb "bespeak" & a fashionable adjective meaning "custom-made"



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Futures qualifying

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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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Tennis legend

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christ wrote:

... 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!)


Interesting...

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



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Intermediate Club Player

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Stircrazy wrote:
christ wrote:

... 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!)


Interesting...

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


 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.  



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