English question: what does “any one dice” mean

[Myth27]

I’m not a native English speaker and I’m feeling very stupid for asking this question, but I’ve never seen anyone written separately. What does it mean? Does it just mean “any dice” or does it mean “any dice that was rolled a 1”?
The sentence is “with this ability you may re-roll any one dice once”
Does it mean you reroll a single dice? Can you reroll all the dice once?

[thirsting]

It means you may reroll only one die, once.

[Zombimode]

I’m not a native English speaker and I’m feeling very stupid for asking this question, but I’ve never seen anyone written separately. What does it mean? Does it just mean “any dice” or does it mean “any dice that was rolled a 1”?
The sentence is “with this ability you may re-roll any one dice once”
Does it mean you reroll a single dice? Can you reroll all the dice once?

Imagine a set of dice. You have a reroll ability.

The ability needs to specify which dice you can reroll and how many. Without those specifications the ability would just read "you can re-roll dice".

"any" is the key-word that tells you which dice you can re-roll. In this case there are no restrictions to which dice you can choose to re-roll, which is the meaning of "any".

"one" tells you that you can re-roll a single die, thus answers the question of "how many?".

[Myth27]

Imagine a set of dice. You have a reroll ability.

The ability needs to specify which dice you can reroll and how many. Without those specifications the ability would just read "you can re-roll dice".

"any" is the key-word that tells you which dice you can re-roll. In this case there are no restrictions to which dice you can choose to re-roll, which is the meaning of "any".

"one" tells you that you can re-roll a single die, thus answers the question of "how many?".

Thank you very much. I have really appreciated this clear explanation :)

[Pufferwockey]

I wouldn't speak up if this wasn't an English question, but the singular of "dice" is "die." Hearing or reading about "one dice" is fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul.

[Myth27]

I wouldn't speak up if this wasn't an English question, but the singular of "dice" is "die." Hearing or reading about "one dice" is fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul.

apparently dice is officially considered a correct singular now

[Pufferwockey]

apparently dice is officially considered a correct singular now

This is worse than when it became correct to use literally to mean figuratively. In that case you could at least argue something something poetic hyperbole something something.

[Max_Killjoy]

This is worse than when it became correct to use literally to mean figuratively. In that case you could at least argue something something poetic hyperbole something something.

That never became correct, it just became unstoppable.

[GrayDeath]

That never became correct, it just became unstoppable.

And hence people saying it was correct could not be stopped? ^^

[The Random NPC]

This is worse than when it became correct to use literally to mean figuratively. In that case you could at least argue something something poetic hyperbole something something.

Literally has meant figuratively for literally hundreds of years.
First recorded use was in 1769.

[ezekielraiden]

Literally has meant figuratively for literally hundreds of years.
First recorded use was in 1769.

"Literally" has been used in a loose, e.g. nonliteral, intensifier sense for a significant period by notable, well-regarded, and professional writers. That is literally (and I do not mean this as an intensifier) not the meaning of what you wrote.

For those who find this situation appalling, look up the etymology of "anathema" and "unravelled." You will find that both words seem to have developed exactly the same "means its opposite" effect in the past, and for vaguely similar reasons. "Anathema" had as its temptation, "that which is set apart," and thus referred to that which was sacred, meant for the gods. It came to mean anything that was separated from mortal concerns by divine mandate, and from there, that which was unacceptable by divine mandate, until it eventually came to be a synonym of "profane" or "excommunicated." Likewise, both "unravelled" and "ravelled" mean untying something, but IIRC the former has a soft implication of leaving a tangled clump or a mess (e.g. the result of a piece of cloth unweaving by itself) while the latter again very softly implies something deliberate and more "neat" (e.g. a tailor intentionally unweaving a piece of cloth).

As for the die vs. dice thing? It's chiefly a British vs. American difference, and "die" is still recognized by every metric and dictionary I could find as the universally more-accepted singular word. In Commonwealth countries, the usage gap is narrower but still clearly favors "die." In the US it is hands-down "die." So before people start despairing at the demise of good language, chill out and remember that language is alive and dynamic.

[The Random NPC]

"Literally" has been used in a loose, e.g. nonliteral, intensifier sense for a significant period by notable, well-regarded, and professional writers. That is literally (and I do not mean this as an intensifier) not the meaning of what you wrote.

For those who find this situation appalling, look up the etymology of "anathema" and "unravelled." You will find that both words seem to have developed exactly the same "means its opposite" effect in the past, and for vaguely similar reasons. "Anathema" had as its temptation, "that which is set apart," and thus referred to that which was sacred, meant for the gods. It came to mean anything that was separated from mortal concerns by divine mandate, and from there, that which was unacceptable by divine mandate, until it eventually came to be a synonym of "profane" or "excommunicated." Likewise, both "unravelled" and "ravelled" mean untying something, but IIRC the former has a soft implication of leaving a tangled clump or a mess (e.g. the result of a piece of cloth unweaving by itself) while the latter again very softly implies something deliberate and more "neat" (e.g. a tailor intentionally unweaving a piece of cloth).

As for the die vs. dice thing? It's chiefly a British vs. American difference, and "die" is still recognized by every metric and dictionary I could find as the universally more-accepted singular word. In Commonwealth countries, the usage gap is narrower but still clearly favors "die." In the US it is hands-down "die." So before people start despairing at the demise of good language, chill out and remember that language is alive and dynamic.

Yeah, it's just my pithy way of saying, "you're arguing about something that's been going on since forever, and will continue to go on forever". Also taking the mick a bit.

[Pufferwockey]

Shouldn't have brought it up. I'm aware of language's non-static nature and I'm generally fine with it but the dice die thing just bugs me. For what it's worth I'm actually aware of literaly's long history of being used as an intensifier. I think codifying it as an officially correct usage in some dictionaries was dumb but I think most of English is dumb and possibly all communication beyond pointing and grunting was a mistake.

[Max_Killjoy]

"Literally" has been used in a loose, e.g. nonliteral, intensifier sense for a significant period by notable, well-regarded, and professional writers. That is literally (and I do not mean this as an intensifier) not the meaning of what you wrote.

For those who find this situation appalling, look up the etymology of "anathema" and "unravelled." You will find that both words seem to have developed exactly the same "means its opposite" effect in the past, and for vaguely similar reasons. "Anathema" had as its temptation, "that which is set apart," and thus referred to that which was sacred, meant for the gods. It came to mean anything that was separated from mortal concerns by divine mandate, and from there, that which was unacceptable by divine mandate, until it eventually came to be a synonym of "profane" or "excommunicated." Likewise, both "unravelled" and "ravelled" mean untying something, but IIRC the former has a soft implication of leaving a tangled clump or a mess (e.g. the result of a piece of cloth unweaving by itself) while the latter again very softly implies something deliberate and more "neat" (e.g. a tailor intentionally unweaving a piece of cloth).

As for the die vs. dice thing? It's chiefly a British vs. American difference, and "die" is still recognized by every metric and dictionary I could find as the universally more-accepted singular word. In Commonwealth countries, the usage gap is narrower but still clearly favors "die." In the US it is hands-down "die." So before people start despairing at the demise of good language, chill out and remember that language is alive and dynamic.

The advantage of the printing press, the internet, and widespread literacy is that language no longer needs to rot away into a meaningless blur of words that mean whatever someone wants them to mean. "Alive and dynamic" is just another way of saying "sloppy and pointless".

[Composer99]

Glad to see the hypocritical linguistic prescriptivists hijack a thread.

[Pufferwockey]

Glad to see the hypocritical linguistic prescriptivists hijack a thread.

Yeah that's why I regret bringing it up. On the bright side I'm pretty sure OP's question was answered by the first reply.

[ezekielraiden]

The advantage of the printing press, the internet, and widespread literacy is that language no longer needs to rot away into a meaningless blur of words that mean whatever someone wants them to mean. "Alive and dynamic" is just another way of saying "sloppy and pointless".

You would do well consulting how actual experts in the field consider the subject. I heartily recommend the Merriam-Webster "Ask the Editor" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/video) video series. In particular, some you might find interesting:
Emily Brewster (assoc. ed.), "Literally" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai_VHZq_7eU); "Sneaked vs. Snuck" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqATIOTGmn4); "Old-School Grammar" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISZtcgnTnB0); "'Mispronunciations' That May Be Fine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nYmWt1J4Lg)"; "Alright vs. All Right"
Peter Sokolowski (ed. at large), "How a Word Gets Into the Dictionary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EeQEqqj-dI)"

Another, also from a Merriam-Webster associated editor, but not from that series:
Kory Stamper discussing what it is like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLgn3geod9Q) to work as a dictionary editor.

I particularly recommend the "'Mispronunciations' That May Be Fine" video. Watch all the way to the end (it's not even 2 minutes, so if you have to skip all the others, watch that). Ms. Brewster's opening sentence will almost certainly grate on you, given the intentional use of "unacceptable" pronunciations, but she's making a very, very important point about language by using them--so try to soldier on if you can.

But to respond to your core point: Words are not "a meaningless blur...that mean[s] whatever someone wants them to mean," even in a hardcore descriptivist's view. Words are how people use them. In other words, just like social etiquette, the rules of chess, or the ways in which one conducts scientific study, the rules do change...but only over relatively long periods of time for most things. Coining new words (as touched on by Mr. Sokolowski) can sometimes happen quickly (as it did with the Twitter-related meanings of "tweet"), but it usually takes many years. Similarly, changing the meaning of a word usually takes decades. Hence my reference to "reclaiming" words that have been used as slurs in the past (obviously I cannot give any examples without running afoul of board rules regarding IRL topics, but you can find many examples).

That is: Who decides how "basketball" is played? We all agree one can learn to play basketball, we all agree that there are other sports which are not basketball. But who decides what specifically counts as "basketball"? The long and short of it is: everyone, collectively. We all contribute to a shared social understanding of what it is. The game could have been different, and definitely has changed over time, e.g. we no longer use any baskets in basketball, and instead use hoops and nets. (The original baskets were extremely tedious to use, as someone had to climb up a ladder to pull the ball out!) Yet we continue to call it "basketball" because the term refers to the game-construct, not to the literal details thereof. Modern coinages even recognize this change; a casual way to ask if someone wants to play two-person basketball is, "you wanna shoot some hoops?" and we say that a perfect shot that never touches the hoop has gotten "nothing but net."

Words have meanings, pronunciations, spellings, etc.; they are not a free-for-all invent-whatever-you-want-athon. If you want to communicate, you have to play the game people are playing, not the game you wish everyone was playing. Those meanings are only totally stable, consistent, and unquestionable over a given period of time, and the printing press, internet, and widespread literacy have not actually changed that to any meaningful degree. English as we speak it today has only existed for around 600 years; English in any form we would even somewhat understand has only existed for around a thousand. Prior to that, it was Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English, which is very nearly incomprehensible to the modern user. Clearly, you accept that we don't speak Old or even Middle English anymore, so the question becomes why some particular period of English gets special treatment as the one, unique, for-all-time English, and all the previous ones don't.

[VoxRationis]

Frankly, descriptivists are just as dogmatic as prescriptivists. If I were "alive and dynamic" in the same way that modern English is said to be, I'd be dropping pieces of my digits off as I forgot about them. Some linguistic change is creative, sure, but a lot of it is because people fail to learn the rules as they were taught, or are too lazy to apply them (such as with any phonetic change labeled "ease of articulation," which is essentially euphemistic), and I don't see why it should be taboo to call people out on it.

[Porcupinata]

I wouldn't speak up if this wasn't an English question, but the singular of "dice" is "die." Hearing or reading about "one dice" is fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul.


apparently dice is officially considered a correct singular now

In UK-English, "dice" has always been acceptable as both singular and plural. When I was a kid in the 1970s, for example, most board game instructions used "dice" as a singular.

So while it might be a "language changes and I don't like it" issue for some, it's also a UK-English/US-English issue.

[NNescio]

Alea iacta est Aleae iactae sunt.

[Pufferwockey]

In UK-English, "dice" has always been acceptable as both singular and plural. When I was a kid in the 1970s, for example, most board game instructions used "dice" as a singular.

So while it might be a "language changes and I don't like it" issue for some, it's also a UK-English/US-English issue.

That's a surprise. I suppose there will be a fair bit of regional variation within the UK as well.

I figured that since fair dice require some precision to make there was an etymological connection between dice and "tool and die" and that being the case UK English would hold more strictly to the distinction between the singular and plural words. As I type this I'm realizing that I've never heard die in the "tool and die" context pluralized to dice, plus I'm definitely making some assumptions about UK attitudes to language, which are probably unfounded.

[Max_Killjoy]

You would do well consulting how actual experts in the field consider the subject.


I'm well aware that the "experts" have given up and embraced the rot.



If you want to communicate, you have to play the game people are playing, not the game you wish everyone was playing.


If the purpose of language is communication, then random changes, exclusionary slang, divergence of dialects, and treating poor language skills as a "subcultural dialect" run entirely counter to that purpose.

Look at all the debates here that go in circles because we can't even agree on what basic words mean, or find common terminology.




Frankly, descriptivists are just as dogmatic as prescriptivists. If I were "alive and dynamic" in the same way that modern English is said to be, I'd be dropping pieces of my digits off as I forgot about them. Some linguistic change is creative, sure, but a lot of it is because people fail to learn the rules as they were taught, or are too lazy to apply them (such as with any phonetic change labeled "ease of articulation," which is essentially euphemistic), and I don't see why it should be taboo to call people out on it.


Exactly.

But try telling that to the postmodernists.

[Lord Torath]

*snip argument on changes in language*

I give you: The Grammar League! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIq2LLLlk0M)

[MrSandman]

Frankly, descriptivists are just as dogmatic as prescriptivists. If I were "alive and dynamic" in the same way that modern English is said to be, I'd be dropping pieces of my digits off as I forgot about them. Some linguistic change is creative, sure, but a lot of it is because people fail to learn the rules as they were taught, or are too lazy to apply them (such as with any phonetic change labeled "ease of articulation," which is essentially euphemistic), and I don't see why it should be taboo to call people out on it.

Yes, you can be dogmatic with anything you want. But they at least recognise that there usually is a reason for people to use language in a certain way and try to understand the rules they are operating within instead of calling it failure or laziness.



If the purpose of language is communication, then random changes, exclusionary slang, divergence of dialects, and treating poor language skills as a "subcultural dialect" run entirely counter to that purpose.

Look at all the debates here that go in circles because we can't even agree on what basic words mean, or find common terminology.


And yet, I have hardly found a discussion on the internet where people were having trouble understanding one another because someone used literally as an emphatic intensifier or dice as a singular word. Most often I find that the trouble rather comes from people not reading the whole discussion and looking for something to disagree on before giving other people's posts a fair hearing.

But pray tell me, why should we all use your rules instead of someone else's? Why are they better?

[Khedrac]

That's a surprise. I suppose there will be a fair bit of regional variation within the UK as well.

I figured that since fair dice require some precision to make there was an etymological connection between dice and "tool and die" and that being the case UK English would hold more strictly to the distinction between the singular and plural words. As I type this I'm realizing that I've never heard die in the "tool and die" context pluralized to dice, plus I'm definitely making some assumptions about UK attitudes to language, which are probably unfounded.

Yes, that's an interesting one - I have often heard "die" take the "dies" plural in this context which is weird.

[ezekielraiden]

I'm well aware that the "experts" have given up and embraced the rot.
It isn't rot. But since you aren't willing to engage with sincere efforts at interaction via external content:

How do you pronounce "two knights"?

What is the second-person singular pronoun? How are second-person singular verbs conjugated?

Do you detect any grammatical flaws in the phrase "to boldly go where no one has gone before"?

What is the term for the desktop device you presumably use (or at least could use) to access this forum? What is the term for a human being who performs mathematical calculations?

Which is correct: "drive safe" or "drive safely"?

Unless you've watched at least some of those videos, you may find some surprises in the answers to these questions (though neither is a function of the other).


If the purpose of language is communication, then random changes, exclusionary slang, divergence of dialects, and treating poor language skills as a "subcultural dialect" run entirely counter to that purpose.
The changes aren't random. That's the whole point. They happen for reasons, patterns of behavior that persist over time. It's why English (effectively) doesn't have a case system anymore, despite having one in Old English. (Technically, the relics linger in our pronouns, but other than those, we only have two cases: "common" an possessive.) Not all changes result in loss, either; English has become very productive with prefix and suffix structures in the past century (e.g. adapting the "-ish" suffix from words like "greenish" to refer to most adjectives and even some nouns, to indicate loose approximation), possibly indicating that modern English is becoming a little more like German.

I frankly have no idea what "exclusionary slang" refers to. Slang is an enormously important source of new words and phrases. Many of these phrases die out, and certainly most of them are not welcome in formal-register speaking or writing. But, to give one important example, the modern indefinite article--"a," or "an" before a vowel--vowel--literally only exists because using the word for "one" (then pronounced more like it rhymes with the modern word lawn) was too much effort, so people would abbreviate it to "a," except when that would cause confusion...such as immediately before another vowel. Yet this is an incredibly important element of modern English grammatical structure; without it, much of what we say would be made impossibly awkward or even unspeakable at all. If this bit of "laziness" Is acceptable and others are not, why?

Dialectic divergence is a fact of life. Again, unless you mean to say that we really should all be speaking Anglo-Saxon instead of English, since that's the pure language before it got corrupted by all this lazy, caseless slang and corruptions from foreign languages. Bring back the accusative, the dative! Resurrect the subjunctive!

I have not, even once, said that poor language skills are a dialectical thing. There are such things as different registers (people speak differently to their friends vs their parents vs a police officer vs a small child etc.) and different contexts (e.g. some words have radically different meaning to British speakers vs American speakers, which can cause controversy; consider "spaz," a harmless term in the US but an incredibly offensive slur in the UK). Developing good communications skills, in part, relies on knowing your audience and tailoring your message; in other words, playing by loose and casual rules when it's just you shooting some hoops with a buddy, and playing by the formal NBA rules when it's the Lakers playing the Blazers or what-have-you. Good communication skills *means* knowing how people *expect* language to be used, and adjusting your choices accordingly; sometimes it is good to break those expectations, sometimes it's not, and sometimes you just don't care enough either way.


Look at all the debates here that go in circles because we can't even agree on what basic words mean, or find common terminology.
Slang and words changing over very long periods of time (decades or centuries, very very rarely anything less) has no effect on this. If anything, it is exactly the things you claim "fix" the "rot" that causes it: we are forced to communicate with people with whom we share little to no direct knowledge, and it reveals how many deep assumptions we make about the terms we use and the ways they can be used.


But try telling that to the postmodernists.
Excuse me? I am NOT a postmodernist, and I am frankly pretty insulted you would insinuate otherwise without any evidence. I have no love for its philosophical or aesthetic principles (though at least on the latter I have no problem with others liking that per se; de gustibus non disputandum est.)

I'd also appreciate it if you laid off the ad hominem.

Edit:

Frankly, descriptivists are just as dogmatic as prescriptivists. If I were "alive and dynamic" in the same way that modern English is said to be, I'd be dropping pieces of my digits off as I forgot about them.
You are doing that though. Every single day. They're called shed skin cells. You don't notice them because they're tiny and dead, exactly like the words that fall out of use from English. Likewise, you have internal structures with vestigial or minimal function (such as the appendix) which are not used much, but not removed because there is no health problem with them; and English keeps old words that are rarely used but not useless for a long, long time. Similarly, while the precise locations of individual cells in your body change over time (your skin grows up, replacing dead layers from beneath), durable, consistent, identifiable structures exist, like your bones and organs, analogous to things like our pronouns and core verbs like to be, which have remained nearly unchanged for over a thousand years, and possibly much longer. You don't shed those things. You shed the dead outer stuff that wasn't individually all that important.


Some linguistic change is creative, sure, but a lot of it is because people fail to learn the rules as they were taught, or are too lazy to apply them (such as with any phonetic change labeled "ease of articulation," which is essentially euphemistic), and I don't see why it should be taboo to call people out on it.
"Taboo" is too strong a word. I am not saying that usage guidance is wrong (far from it; if I was, why would I have mentioned the Chicago Manual of Style?), nor that it is always misplaced. I am responding to an extreme, hostile view of anything other than the One True English, against which all other "rot" is to be villified, hated, and scorned for the society-destroying sum it (allegedly) is.

Like, even with the "literally" thing? A serious descriptivist also has to note that this is nonstandard, and therefore some people will judge you for using it. (Which is explicitly said in thr Merriam-Webster video about it, by the way.) It's not "an officially correct usage" in any dictionary because dictionaries do not talk about "officially correct" anything, they tell people how things are used, including non-standard, slang, or colloquial uses. It is a common and foolish misconception that a dictionary tells you how to use language correctly, promulgated by the very people who say that "words mean things" (yet, evidently, "dictionary" means what they wish it to mean, not what its editors actually DO to make it!)

As Kory Stamper notes, for a word to be included in their dictionary, it must have widespread usage (so one-off moments and niche jargon probably don't apply), it must have some shelf life (so flash-in-the-pan words like "nothingburger" probably don't qualify), and it must have meaningful use (that is, it must mean something when used). "Antidisestabmishmentarianism" fails this third test, as people very, very rarely use it for its meaning (the philosophy of opposing, or opposing the philosophy of, the separation of church and state), only for its length or difficulty of spelling. Similar words include "honorificabilitudinitatibus," a hapax legomenon from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost that means "capable of receiving honors" (originally a Latin dative/ablative plural), and "floccinaucinihilipilification," an obscure agglomeration of several Latin words which means "the act or habit of estimating one or more things as worthless." (It's really quite overwrought if you know the Latin words it's assembled from, very much "purple prose" in a single word.) Both have a meaning, but one isn't used at all in modern English and the other's usage as a meaningful word is so rare that it's not worth putting into a dictionary that isn't aiming to be "unabridged." (Aside: have you ever seen a *printed* unabridged OED? Bloody massive! Anyone who says words will never hurt them has not contemplated having an unabridged OED dropped on their heads.)

So yeah. "Literally" has significant non-standard usage as a hyperbolic intensifier. "Dice" has even more significant use (at least in Commonwealth countries) as the singular word for a face-transitive random number generation tool, frequently a cube; the use is common enough that some people will in fact insist that it is the correct use and "die" is incorrect, but overall "die" remains more common and, thus, a good dictionary will tell you the use of "dice" as a singular word is non-standard. Merriam-Webster even has a handy symbol for marking such terms! Which is explicitly said in the Merriam-Webster video about "literally."

[lesser_minion]

And yet, I have hardly found a discussion on the internet where people were having trouble understanding one another because someone used literally as an emphatic intensifier or dice as a singular word. Most often I find that the trouble rather comes from people not reading the whole discussion and looking for something to disagree on before giving other people's posts a fair hearing.

But pray tell me, why should we all use your rules instead of someone else's? Why are they better?

Pretty much this. If the purpose of language is communication, then what matters is how well ideas are communicated. Style guides and dictionaries can document what works for particular people, but complaining about language 'misuses' that do not impede communication just because they don't accord with what some editor or etymologist once had to say is just plain snobbery.

[VoxRationis]

Do you detect any grammatical flaws in the phrase "to boldly go where no one has gone before"?

The "no split infinitives" rule was always artificial, however, imposed by analogy with Latin, in which it is impossible to have split infinitives. That's very different from retaining grammatical inflections.


It's why English (effectively) doesn't have a case system anymore, despite having one in Old English. (Technically, the relics linger in our pronouns, but other than those, we only have two cases: "common" an possessive.) Not all changes result in loss, either; English has become very productive with prefix and suffix structures in the past century (e.g. adapting the "-ish" suffix from words like "greenish" to refer to most adjectives and even some nouns, to indicate loose approximation), possibly indicating that modern English is becoming a little more like German.


Dialectic divergence is a fact of life. Again, unless you mean to say that we really should all be speaking Anglo-Saxon instead of English, since that's the pure language before it got corrupted by all this lazy, caseless slang and corruptions from foreign languages. Bring back the accusative, the dative! Resurrect the subjunctive!

...

You are doing that though. Every single day. They're called shed skin cells. You don't notice them because they're tiny and dead, exactly like the words that fall out of use from English. Likewise, you have internal structures with vestigial or minimal function (such as the appendix) which are not used much, but not removed because there is no health problem with them; and English keeps old words that are rarely used but not useless for a long, long time. Similarly, while the precise locations of individual cells in your body change over time (your skin grows up, replacing dead layers from beneath), durable, consistent, identifiable structures exist, like your bones and organs, analogous to things like our pronouns and core verbs like to be, which have remained nearly unchanged for over a thousand years, and possibly much longer. You don't shed those things. You shed the dead outer stuff that wasn't individually all that important.

Those are archaic entire words, however, rather than loss of things like inflection, which is my point with die-dice here (though I am fond of a good archaism). Losing grammatical inflection is much more akin to losing pieces of one's digits; even if one gets by with the stumps, one has lost points of articulation, which renders the whole structure less flexible and less suitable for certain tasks. Retaining markers for case, number, tense, mood, et cetera concisely encodes a significant amount of information; except in jokes and certain rhetorical instances where ambiguity is desired, this is a desideratum for language. In addition, verb-subject agreement can help provide redundancy that hedges against situations where part of the sentence might be missed. I do in fact lament the loss of the Old English grammatical structure. Pointing out that it's eroded before, therefore, misses the point. To use another metaphor, the fact that the porch and foyer of one's house have fallen away through neglect does not mean that one should blithely accept the loss of the living room, even if one lacks the ability to rebuild the collapsed chambers. I acknowledged earlier that there is creative and productive linguistic change that occurs; I just think it's somewhat idealistic and ideological to assert that all change is good and a sign of being "alive," or to pretend that it does not often occur through ignorance of or apathy toward the language as it has stood prior to the point of speaking.

(Do you not use the subjunctive, or is it that you are referring to using it as intrinsic parts of the verb, rather than through inflection of the auxiliary verbs?)


(Aside: have you ever seen a *printed* unabridged OED? Bloody massive! Anyone who says words will never hurt them has not contemplated having an unabridged OED dropped on their heads.)

I actually have! My family has a copy of the "compact" version that manages to shrink it down into a mere four volumes (albeit each the size of my chest) by fitting four pages from the full-size edition to one page and including a magnifying glass.

I also have to wonder about Merriam-Webster sometimes. My work requires that I spell things precisely according to the primary listed spelling in the MW, and they seem to have a strange problem with compound words. Their primary spellings will frequently insist on separating compound words in ways I have never seen outside of the MW, which seems strange for a descriptive dictionary.

Anyway, to the original question: descriptively, according to the English I know and speak, the phrase "any one dice" is self-contradictory and doesn't allow for the sentence to "flow." The likely intended meaning ("any single number-engraved solid out of a contextually defined group of such solids") can be reconstructed, but I would have to stop in order to do it, and if it were placed in a sentence in the middle of text, I would probably have to read it several times over in order to determine whether I should disregard the "any one" or the plural in parsing it.

[Max_Killjoy]

I just think it's somewhat idealistic and ideological to assert that all change is good and a sign of being "alive," or to pretend that it does not often occur through ignorance of or apathy toward the language as it has stood prior to the point of speaking.


Sadly, we live in a world where "all change is good" has become a axiomatic and dogmatic belief for too many people, despite the volumes of blatantly obvious evidence to the contrary.

[halfeye]

But pray tell me, why should we all use your rules instead of someone else's? Why are they better?

Because they are rules.

Someone saying things one way one time, and another way the next isn't using any rules at all.


I frankly have no idea what "exclusionary slang" refers to.

The entire point of some slangs is to prevent other people from understanding what is being said. Examples include pig latin, various thieves' cants and rhyming slang. Jargon often has the subsiduary purpose of making it more difficult for outsiders to become employed in certain industries.

[ezekielraiden]

The "no split infinitives" rule was always artificial, however, imposed by analogy with Latin, in which it is impossible to have split infinitives. That's very different from retaining grammatical inflections.
It really isn't--both are forms of declension.


Those are archaic entire words, however, rather than loss of things like inflection, which is my point with die-dice here (though I am fond of a good archaism). Losing grammatical inflection is much more akin to losing pieces of one's digits; even if one gets by with the stumps, one has lost points of articulation, which renders the whole structure less flexible and less suitable for certain tasks. Retaining markers for case, number, tense, mood, et cetera concisely encodes a significant amount of information; except in jokes and certain rhetorical instances where ambiguity is desired, this is a desideratum for language.
Okay. But--presumably, since I strongly doubt that MaxKilljoy's One True Way to communicate in English means going all the way back to Anglo-Saxon to recover noun and verb declensions that haven't existed for nearly a thousand years--not that much has been lost, has it? English lacks the word-order flexibility of Latin, for example, where it is possible to hide the subject of a sentence until the very last word if you wish (some really quite good Latin jokes do this, for example). But we still communicate just fine, because we have employed other structures to perform the same function. We have a largely set word order (I say "largely" because things like questions tweak it, but in consistent ways) which fulfills that function, and we use particles and prepositions to fill in for the functions of dative and ablative when necessary (though frankly both of those are, shall we say, niche even in Latin). Similarly, we use a suffix ('s) for many possessives (basically the only remaining function of the genitive in English) and an obscure/archaic preposition ("O") for the vocative (which few English speakers even know is a thing, thinking it's just a weird way people used to speak in Middle English).

If "rot" includes the very ways we use nouns and verbs right now, it seems impossible for us to have any language at all that isn't unrecoverably "rotten." And if it doesn't, then we have the problem of arbitrary lines--deciding that only after 1700, or 1850, or whatever, that's when Real English happened, and everything before was merely prologue, while everything after is offal.


I acknowledged earlier that there is creative and productive linguistic change that occurs; I just think it's somewhat idealistic and ideological to assert that all change is good and a sign of being "alive," or to pretend that it does not often occur through ignorance of or apathy toward the language as it has stood prior to the point of speaking.
But I never said that, and would never have said that. I have exclusively been responding to the vitriol targeted at any form of linguistic differences caused by alteration over time. Similarly, your framing this as being exclusively decay, destruction, loss, the removal of vital and irreplaceable things. That's...just not true. Otherwise, how would we be communicating now? As I said above, we've clearly got the ability to read what each other writes. English has changed how it expresses the things that were once expressed via case; do you really mean to assert that English has lost the ability to (for example) communicate anything about indirect objects? If so, how on earth are you able to parse the sentence "we told you a lie"?

Further, we see genuine development in other areas. When "you" replaced "thou," becoming both the singular and plural second-person pronoun, that left a syntactic gap. This was then filled with "you all," though technically "you" remains perfectly serviceable in both roles. Likewise, we are finding that it is useful to have a term that doesn't imply non-personhood (like "it" does), but that also doesn't require the assumption of being male or female (like "he" and "she" do), and at least as far back as Shakespeare, "they" has served quite well for this purpose. It's following exactly the same pattern as "you" did, retaining plural verb forms when used in a singular way (that's why it's "you are"; the original English second-person singular conjugation was "thou art" and other forms ending in -t or -st, e.g. "canst" and "hast").


(Do you not use the subjunctive, or is it that you are referring to using it as intrinsic parts of the verb, rather than through inflection of the auxiliary verbs?)
I use it, though relatively rarely--as most English speakers do. That is, we almost always use conditional past-tense phrasing in modern English instead of using present-tense subjunctives, in part because many subjunctive forms look jarringly like past-tense indicative forms, and can thus trigger a "wait, is that right?" response. E.g. many people will sing America the Beautiful with the line, "God shed His grace on thee,/And crowned thy good," which is not what the original text says. The original text does use the subjunctive; it is exhorting God to shed His grace and crown America's good with brotherhood, but in-context that use is very, very difficult to distinguish from past-tense indicative. As a different example, many people will say, "If I was President, <blah>" to speak hypothetically, and may be surprised or confused if someone says, "If I were President, <blah>," because the subjunctive is almost dead in modern English. We still technically have it, and we still technically use it enough to count, but it's very nearly gone entirely.


I actually have! My family has a copy of the "compact" version that manages to shrink it down into a mere four volumes (albeit each the size of my chest) by fitting four pages from the full-size edition to one page and including a magnifying glass.
Necessity truly is the mother of invention. My elementary school had an extremely old (easily 50s or earier) "unabriged" OED that somehow fit in a single volume, but it sat on a little lectern in the library because it was too heavy for anyone, even the librarians, to move.


I also have to wonder about Merriam-Webster sometimes. My work requires that I spell things precisely according to the primary listed spelling in the MW, and they seem to have a strange problem with compound words. Their primary spellings will frequently insist on separating compound words in ways I have never seen outside of the MW, which seems strange for a descriptive dictionary.
Something that's mentioned in Kory Stamper's video that I linked above is that those separation marks have nothing to do with pronunciation--they're the recommended places for splitting the word, if you need to introduce a hyphen-break. I hadn't actually known that prior to watching that video, so perhaps that's what's relevant here?


Anyway, to the original question: descriptively, according to the English I know and speak, the phrase "any one dice" is self-contradictory and doesn't allow for the sentence to "flow." The likely intended meaning ("any single number-engraved solid out of a contextually defined group of such solids") can be reconstructed, but I would have to stop in order to do it, and if it were placed in a sentence in the middle of text, I would probably have to read it several times over in order to determine whether I should disregard the "any one" or the plural in parsing it.
Technically, it cannot be "self-contradictory," as it's neither making nor refuting any claims, but I will grant that it runs contrary to communicating effectively as it would put a hitch in your thoughts every time it came up.


Sadly, we live in a world where "all change is good" has become a axiomatic and dogmatic belief for too many people, despite the volumes of blatantly obvious evidence to the contrary.
Oh? Nobody has said that as far as I can tell, certainly not me. Plenty of change is not good. I've tried to engage with examples, questions, genuine effort to interact with you. All you've done is insult me, dismiss me, or outright ignore me. And I'm the dogmatic one?

Also, if we're going to be syntactically fastidious here, it should be "an axiomatic," not "a axiomatic." The rules are rules, after all (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3y0CD2CoCs).


Because they are rules.
Serious questions: Where did those rules come from? Why do they exist? Why do they take the form they do, and not some other form? I am genuinely not being flippant. Answering these questions drives exactly to the heart of the discussion.


Someone saying things one way one time, and another way the next isn't using any rules at all.
I completely agree--and anyone who does that is communicating poorly, even stupidly. There's a reason we find Lewis Carroll's version of Humpty Dumpty humorously foolish and pompous. But "language changes with time, especially over long periods or wide geographic distances" is worlds away from "saying one thing one time, and another way the next."

And, again, register is a thing. Unless you're meaning to say that a married couple speaking to each other will sound exactly the same as a superior officer speaking to a subordinate, I'm going to assume you recognize that that happens. People do "say things one way one time, and another way the next" some of the time. Varying your vocabulary, style, and tone based on your audience is useful, it makes you a better communicator. A soldier formally informing his commanding officer of his intended shore leave plans when docked where his wife is currently living, vs. that same soldier informing his wife about said plans, is going to sound significantly different despite being at rock bottom the same message.


The entire point of some slangs is to prevent other people from understanding what is being said. Examples include pig latin, various thieves' cants and rhyming slang. Jargon often has the subsiduary purpose of making it more difficult for outsiders to become employed in certain industries.
Okay, but the vast majority of those slang things never make it into a dictionary, specifically because they aren't meant for widespread use. (Pig latin is a cipher method, not a set of code-words itself, so it would never get entered anyway.) If the whole point is for the word to be encoded, then as soon as a dictionary would even think about printing it, it's no longer serving the purpose for which it was intended and its userbase will drop it quickly. Only slang that ceases to be "exclusionary" is worth including in a dictionary, e.g. many drug terms were originally invented to pass off discussion of illicit substances as something innocent. Some of those terms have since become well-known for meaning whatever drug, to the point that they merit inclusion in a dictionary because people are likely to encounter the word used that way. (E.g. use of the word "grass" to mean cannabis sativa and related species.)

And that's a severely jaundiced take on jargon. Sometimes that happens, but most jargon develops for the same reasons as math notation does. To the untrained, quantum physics looks like weird Greek gibberish with triangles--even I thought so until I studied it formally. (When I was in QM I and II, I liked to tell my friends "I'm finally learning the mystic runes!!") Terms like "wave function," "decoherence," "confinement," "wave-particle duality," etc. were not invented to be exclusionary, but to be consistent and specific to further scientific discourse. Yes, a side-effect is that quantum physics seems like mysterious science-magic to many, but that's unavoidable with complex subjects. Unless we want to commit to the idea that having to learn terms inherently makes them exclusionary (in which case all language is exclusionary, because it has to be learned...), it seems unfair to fault (most) jargon for this...and what jargon does fall afoul of it wouldn't be put in a dictionary anyway, because (as with the previous paragraph) it's *meant* to avoid widespread usage.

[Max_Killjoy]

Reduced to attacking simple typos. OK.

As for engagement, and examples, and what happened 1000 years ago, I don't care. I refuse to embrace the rot. I refuse to accept that the cot-caught merger is just a thing that happens, that's perfectly fine, and not a failure of education or learning.

~~~



The entire point of some slangs is to prevent other people from understanding what is being said. Examples include pig latin, various thieves' cants and rhyming slang. Jargon often has the subsiduary purpose of making it more difficult for outsiders to become employed in certain industries.


The entire point of all slangs is to create an in-group and out-group, to obscure what's being said from those who "aren't hip", running entirely counter to the actual purpose of language.

And then there are "terms of art", such as the use of "observed" to mean "it interacted with something" in QM, leading some who aren't familiar with that peculiarity of usage to mistakenly believe that "quantum physics says that human observation creates the world out of an otherwise uncertainty state".

[ezekielraiden]

As for engagement, and examples, and what happened 1000 years ago, I don't care. I refuse to embrace the rot.

{Scrubbed} Where are thy "thou"s?

[Max_Killjoy]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote} . Where are thy "thou"s?

{Scrubbed}

I've said I don't care about past changes, about what happened 200 or 1000 years ago, multiple times, and yet you keep going back to that as if it will demonstrate anything or change my mind.

Bacterial infections were a leading cause of death 200 and 1000 years ago. I don't see entire branches of academia arguing that we should allow those deaths to continue now that we have the means to fight them. But when it comes to language, for some reason, the attitude that we because language suffered from illnesses 200 or 1000 years ago, it's "just the way things are", and we should do nothing to fight it even though we now have the means to do so.

[Pufferwockey]

Yes, that's an interesting one - I have often heard "die" take the "dies" plural in this context which is weird.

From a few minutes of googling it looks to me like there is an etymological connection and yet "dies" is the correct pluralization in that context. Truly the only thing dumber than English is... I'll get back to you when I think of something as dumb as English. Certain rocks maybe? Not all rocks. Just the really dumb ones.

Got it! English majors.

[The Random NPC]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I've said I don't care about past changes, about what happened 200 or 1000 years ago, multiple times, and yet you keep going back to that as if it will demonstrate anything or change my mind.

Bacterial infections were a leading cause of death 200 and 1000 years ago. I don't see entire branches of academia arguing that we should allow those deaths to continue now that we have the means to fight them. But when it comes to language, for some reason, the attitude that we because language suffered from illnesses 200 or 1000 years ago, it's "just the way things are", and we should do nothing to fight it even though we now have the means to do so.

You have indicated that you care about the "correct" use of literally despite it being used in a capacity other than it's strict definition for greater than 200 years.

[Max_Killjoy]

You have indicated that you care about the "correct" use of literally despite it being used in a capacity other than it's strict definition for greater than 200 years.

There's a difference between deliberate hyperbole or inversion for effect... and simple ignorant misuse.

Wordplay for humor or rhetorical effect doesn't change the meanings of the words involved, or create real words... if I joke with friend that something is a "disastrophe", that doesn't make "disastrophe" a real word.

[Tajerio]

"Dice" as singular grates a bit for me, since I was taught the singular as "die." But I understand what's meant when it's said/written, and that's the point of language so I don't complain about it. However, that's why I do complain about the growing usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively"--because there are now overlap situations in which I'm genuinely unsure whether the person I'm talking to means "literally" or "figuratively" when they says "literally."

By the way, crotchety pedants, "they says" was intentional. That's the verb agreeing with the epicene third person singular pronoun "they."

[VoxRationis]

But I never said that, and would never have said that. I have exclusively been responding to the vitriol targeted at any form of linguistic differences caused by alteration over time. Similarly, your framing this as being exclusively decay, destruction, loss, the removal of vital and irreplaceable things. That's...just not true. Otherwise, how would we be communicating now? As I said above, we've clearly got the ability to read what each other writes. English has changed how it expresses the things that were once expressed via case; do you really mean to assert that English has lost the ability to (for example) communicate anything about indirect objects? If so, how on earth are you able to parse the sentence "we told you a lie"?

Are we able to communicate? We seem to each be arguing against an assumed extreme version of the other's viewpoint. I am defending the right to critique linguistic shift in some circumstances, and you are defending against "vitriol targeted at any" change, but we each are reacting as though the other were dealing only in absolutes!

And I do not wish to posit that communication is impossible without inflected forms (indeed, analytic languages such as most of the Chinese languages would not be possible if that were the case), merely that they add something to our language which we should keep if we have the chance.



Technically, it cannot be "self-contradictory," as it's neither making nor refuting any claims, but I will grant that it runs contrary to communicating effectively as it would put a hitch in your thoughts every time it came up.

I meant in that the arguments posited by the phrase are, in the dialect I speak, self-contradictory. "Any one" does make a claim about number, one which the plural form "dice" immediately contradicts.


And that's a severely jaundiced take on jargon. Sometimes that happens, but most jargon develops for the same reasons as math notation does. To the untrained, quantum physics looks like weird Greek gibberish with triangles--even I thought so until I studied it formally. (When I was in QM I and II, I liked to tell my friends "I'm finally learning the mystic runes!!") Terms like "wave function," "decoherence," "confinement," "wave-particle duality," etc. were not invented to be exclusionary, but to be consistent and specific to further scientific discourse. Yes, a side-effect is that quantum physics seems like mysterious science-magic to many, but that's unavoidable with complex subjects. Unless we want to commit to the idea that having to learn terms inherently makes them exclusionary (in which case all language is exclusionary, because it has to be learned...), it seems unfair to fault (most) jargon for this...and what jargon does fall afoul of it wouldn't be put in a dictionary anyway, because (as with the previous paragraph) it's *meant* to avoid widespread usage.

I think there is definitely jargon that is meant to be obfuscatory (usually that of the sort that pluralizes words ending in the suffix "ism"), but I support your point about certain jargons, particularly in science and math. There's simply no way to consistently and precisely describe things which by their nature are outside ordinary ken without using language which is opaque to ordinary people.

[Ashtagon]

In UK-English, "dice" has always been acceptable as both singular and plural.

It really hasn't.

What you may find is a certain amount of self-censorship, because people of the B.A.D.D. ilk would see the word "die" and incorrectly associate it with death.

[Khedrac]

From a few minutes of googling it looks to me like there is an etymological connection and yet "dies" is the correct pluralization in that context. Truly the only thing dumber than English is... I'll get back to you when I think of something as dumb as English. Certain rocks maybe? Not all rocks. Just the really dumb ones.

Got it! English majors.

It does seem that way doesn't it... I wonder if that has happened to avoid confusion and make technical conversations less subject to misunderstandings?


"Dice" as singular grates a bit for me, since I was taught the singular as "die." But I understand what's meant when it's said/written, and that's the point of language so I don't complain about it. However, that's why I do complain about the growing usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively"--because there are now overlap situations in which I'm genuinely unsure whether the person I'm talking to means "literally" or "figuratively" when they says "literally."

By the way, crotchety pedants, "they says" was intentional. That's the verb agreeing with the epicene third person singular pronoun "they."

I grew up with "dice" as the singular (in the UK in the 70s) and my parents were both very literate and erudite and definitely concerned about which accent and pronunciations I used as I developed; thus I think this very much depends where and when one was educated.
(To illustrate, I grew up in Somerset and yet, apart from the occasional trace of Bristle, virtually everyone would place my accent as home counties.)

I still actively have to remember to use "die" as the singular for a physical random number generator, yet I have no issue remembering to use "dies" as the plural for theparts of a manufacturing process (probably because I never originally linked the two words).

On the subject of Compact OEDs:
Originally the OED was produced to 12 volumes.
A 2-volume 4-pages-per-page "compact" edition was published (with magnifying glass) - I was lucky enough to find one second-hand for £20.
The revised OED was then produced at 15 volumes (iirc); and there were two versions of it's "Compact" ediiton produced:
one is a 3-volume 4-pages-per-page;
the other is a 1-volume 9-pages-per-page - which my brother found second-hand for £60 and I bought off him for £40 plus the older version (which he prefers). I usually keep it at work as it gets more use there.

On point about the OED is that it tries to include every word ever used as English, and thus includes many that should more properly be regarded as foreign or "not naturalized" as the dictionary puts it. E.g. "dghajsa" - a type of Maltese fishing boat (the ones that resemble Venetian gondolas).

[Max_Killjoy]

I think there is definitely jargon that is meant to be obfuscatory (usually that of the sort that pluralizes words ending in the suffix "ism"), but I support your point about certain jargons, particularly in science and math. There's simply no way to consistently and precisely describe things which by their nature are outside ordinary ken without using language which is opaque to ordinary people.


On the other hand, there's a good deal of deliberate obscurantism as well -- even in the hard sciences at this point. But then it's no surprise that descriptivism rose in popularity in "the academy" in the same time frame as the mother of all obscurantist movements, postmodernism.

[Pufferwockey]

On point about the OED is that it tries to include every word ever used as English, and thus includes many that should more properly be regarded as foreign or "not naturalized" as the dictionary puts it. E.g. "dghajsa" - a type of Maltese fishing boat (the ones that resemble Venetian gondolas).

The point being that, at least in the case of the OED, inclusion in the dictionary is not by itself evidence that something is correct English?

[halfeye]

Serious questions: Where did those rules come from? Why do they exist? Why do they take the form they do, and not some other form? I am genuinely not being flippant. Answering these questions drives exactly to the heart of the discussion.

The rules come from history and tradition, and the main thing about them is that there are a lot of them and they mostly work together because the ones that didn't got weeded out a long time ago.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, some bright spark's new rule messes up a lot of other rules even if it does do what it's intended to, which half the time it doesn't.


I completely agree--and anyone who does that is communicating poorly, even stupidly. There's a reason we find Lewis Carroll's version of Humpty Dumpty humorously foolish and pompous. But "language changes with time, especially over long periods or wide geographic distances" is worlds away from "saying one thing one time, and another way the next."

And, again, register is a thing. Unless you're meaning to say that a married couple speaking to each other will sound exactly the same as a superior officer speaking to a subordinate, I'm going to assume you recognize that that happens. People do "say things one way one time, and another way the next" some of the time. Varying your vocabulary, style, and tone based on your audience is useful, it makes you a better communicator. A soldier formally informing his commanding officer of his intended shore leave plans when docked where his wife is currently living, vs. that same soldier informing his wife about said plans, is going to sound significantly different despite being at rock bottom the same message.

It's not about that, it's about people learning some words of a language that is new to them, then trying to use those words as if they were part of a different language with which they (but nobody else where they now live) are more familiar, and claiming the right to make that change enforceable on everyone else.

There are more people moving around the world, and that is going to escalate, nobody wants someone else's language forced on them. I think it's up to the people who move, so long as their movement is voluntary, to adapt.

[Segev]

If I say, “This thread has me literally banging my head on my desk,” do you know if the physical part of my body atop my neck is materially impacting the surface on which I write and/or keep my computer, or if I’m merely expressing an intense irritation by intimating that it makes me feel like performing that activity, but I’m not actually doing so?

Regardless of where one stands on linguistic drift, this particular misuse is problematic because it creates confusion. We have other intensifiers. We do not have a synonym that can unambiguously and accurately be used to express what “literally” is denotatively meant to.

[Khedrac]

The point being that, at least in the case of the OED, inclusion in the dictionary is not by itself evidence that something is correct English?

Good question, I hadn't thought my point through to a conclusion.

I think the point is just because a word is in the OED doesn't mean it is recognizable English - it is probably formally correct, but it would be like wearing a top hat and tails for a quick trip to the local corner shop - there's a very good chance no one will understand what you mean by it, and they will accuse you of being crazy (i.e. wrong) even if you have a good valid reason.

Another example from the OED (noticable because it's the first word on a page of the 9/page thus gets to be large print at the top of the page) I cannot even spell correctly on this website: "AS3LT" (obs.[olete] form of assault) - yes the includes some words that contain dead letters like the yogh.

As I understand it, saying that a word is "obsolete" doesn't make it wrong, just completely out-of-date; but when a word uses a letter that was removed from the language several hundred years ago I think we start to need new definitions (which are probably already in there, quite possibly labelled "obs.").

[ezekielraiden]

The rules come from history and tradition, and the main thing about them is that there are a lot of them and they mostly work together because the ones that didn't got weeded out a long time ago.
Sure. But that means they are, fundamentally, arbitrary--often chosen for convenience, or even simply not "chosen" at all (as in, the result of accident or not thinking about it). I want to stress that this does not make them bad. Many things are arbitrary and perfectly acceptable, or even good, and we discover reasons for some of them when we dig deeper. For example, the specific twelve-half-step-interval system used in most European music is purely arbitrary, not at all universal. Some traditional Arabic music uses seventeen intervals, while some traditional Japanese music uses only five. But all of these styles employ (near-)integer ratio fractions for the frequency relations between notes, and this is in part due to the anatomical structure of the human ear and what it is able to detect.

To give a different example, there are rules for good writing. And those rules generally exist for good reason! Having a solid grounding in these rules is, I would argue, essential to being a good writer, just as having a solid grounding in cooking fundamentals is necessary for being a good cook, or any other artistic skill one might wish to discuss. But fundamentally, just like D&D, these rules are predicated on a Rule 0: "Do what makes good writing" (or cooking etc.) In other words, implicit in the rules themselves is the notion that they support producing superior writing. If you encounter a situation where breaking the rules genuinely does produce good writing, it's not just that you can do so, you should do so, because doing so fulfills the purpose for which the rules were developed. Because the rules are predicated on doing what creates good writing, you obey the rules by "breaking" them if and only if breaking them actually produces good writing.

Obeying the rules even when they lead you astray is a problem, but deviating from the rules without benefit is also a problem. Neither extreme is useful or desirable. This principle applies to essentially any rule structure where there is a core purpose behind the rules (moral, aesthetic, practical, what-have-you). If the rules end up leading you away from their purpose, then you should stop following them. "[Jesus replied,] ‘You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “These people honor me with their lips,/but their hearts are far from me./They worship me in vain;/their teachings are merely human rules.”’" (Matt. 15:7-9, NIV) "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,/and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." (Hosea 6:6)


Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, some bright spark's new rule messes up a lot of other rules even if it does do what it's intended to, which half the time it doesn't.
Sure. That's just Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law): "90% of everything is crap." It's the 10% (or 1% or whatever small percentage you prefer) that we keep an eye out for. It doesn't matter if you throw wide the gates or keep them so tightly closed that only a trickle comes out, there will always be a lot of crap and only a little gold. This is the reason why strong descriptivists require widespread usage, not just any usage. If we allowed that any effort in any circumstance ever counted for cataloguing (since that's what a dictionary is, a catalogue of words), dictionaries would be useless. But if we shut out any change whatsoever, dictionaries also become useless, because they don't perform the function for which they were designed: helping people understand what real speakers and writers meant when using words unfamiliar to them.


It's not about that, it's about people learning some words of a language that is new to them, then trying to use those words as if they were part of a different language with which they (but nobody else where they now live) are more familiar, and claiming the right to make that change enforceable on everyone else.
I'm not sure where you are getting the "enforceable" part from. No one here seems to be asserting anything of the sort. Instead, some voices at least seem to be saying "there is Right English, and everything else is Wrong English, and if you say otherwise, you are part of the problem." I grant that there are standards (again, I have personally used style guides--like Chicago, MLA, APA, even The Elements of Style at times despite its deep flaws), but those standards are always both contextual and capable of being questioned and refined. Hence: the language grows and changes with time. Sometimes, that means old structures fall away as they cease to be used. Sometimes, that means new structures arise. Sometimes there are flash-in-the-pan fads. Sometimes there are long-term fashions that linger long, but still fade. And sometimes there are new developments that truly stand the test of time. Shakespeare personally invented an enormous amount of modern English style and structure--there is a reason his plays, more than any other single author's work, are so vitally important to English education, despite sometimes being nearly unreadable for the differences in vocabulary, style, and syntax.


There are more people moving around the world, and that is going to escalate, nobody wants someone else's language forced on them. I think it's up to the people who move, so long as their movement is voluntary, to adapt.
Language will grow and change; that is unavoidable. I grant you that, for people assimilating into a new culture, it behooves them to work on their language fundamentals. As long as there is immigration, that will be true. Though, to be frank, I'm not really sure what that has to do with the part you quoted.


The point being that, at least in the case of the OED, inclusion in the dictionary is not by itself evidence that something is correct English?
Yes. Because that's not what dictionaries are for. A lot of people believe that's what they're for, but those people are, simply, wrong. Because it is still possible to be wrong in a world where language can change. Linguistic drift does not deny the existence of objective truth.


If I say, “This thread has me literally banging my head on my desk,” do you know if the physical part of my body atop my neck is materially impacting the surface on which I write and/or keep my computer, or if I’m merely expressing an intense irritation by intimating that it makes me feel like performing that activity, but I’m not actually doing so?

Regardless of where one stands on linguistic drift, this particular misuse is problematic because it creates confusion. We have other intensifiers. We do not have a synonym that can unambiguously and accurately be used to express what “literally” is denotatively meant to.
Sure, I grant that it is unwisely used by plenty of people--which is literally said in the video I linked. Emily Brewster literally says, "But remember that hyperbole requires care in handling, and that your audience may not recognize it for what it is. You can tell someone that you 'literally devour novels' and that your kids were 'literally bouncing off the walls,' but be prepared for your listener to refuse to lend you books, and to be curious about the composition of your offspring." But the fact that it is unwisely used does not affect the fact that numerous respected authors have used it, and continue to do so into the present day. Or, to turn a phrase, "Dictionaries don't commit usage errors, people do." Many, many people read Dickens, Brontë, Twain, Joyce, or Nabokov--in addition to its use in newspapers and magazines. To fail to include this hyperbolic usage would be to ignore how English is really used, both historically and presently.

And as a point of fact: the displayed Merriam-Webster entry explicitly describes how this is not only a non-standard usage, but highly controversial. Despite being descriptivist in nature, they recognize the conflict between sense 1 and sense 2, and note that "literally" is used in places where it really isn't needed.


Are we able to communicate? We seem to each be arguing against an assumed extreme version of the other's viewpoint. I am defending the right to critique linguistic shift in some circumstances, and you are defending against "vitriol targeted at any" change, but we each are reacting as though the other were dealing only in absolutes!
It seems to me that we are. Certainly we are making better progress, you and I, than I have in many, many arguments I have had elsewhere, despite everyone explicitly agreeing to a set of definitions in some of those arguments. (They were often on a forum that no longer exists, so I'm afraid I can't give examples.) More importantly, though? I don't think you think those extreme things. I have, it seems, poorly spoken, as you believe I meant to ascribe those views to you. I do not mean to do that. I am simply speaking in defense of the idea that a language is healthy if it can (a) add new words and structures that display widespread, meaningful, and durable use; and (b) shed archaisms that are no longer employed by modern users, except for those situations where reading archaic texts is necessary.

Also, if I'm being perfectly honest: having learned Latin, I really don't think case systems are all they're cracked up to be. They provide (or more heavily support) some very interesting structure (e.g. chiasmus and synchysis, hendiadys, anastrophe), but not to such a degree that I find English poetry limited by comparison. And they're an awful lot of work to learn. Similarly, due to Latin having this case structure and (compared to English) much more regular conjugation structure, rhyme is pretty trivial in Latin, whereas the textured and varied origin of English words plus the restrictions on word order make rhyme a far more interesting poetic device in English. So I sort of have a "close a door, open a window" perspective on much of this.


And I do not wish to posit that communication is impossible without inflected forms (indeed, analytic languages such as most of the Chinese languages would not be possible if that were the case), merely that they add something to our language which we should keep if we have the chance.
Then fight in their defense, when and where you can. Encourage not merely literacy, but being well read. Actively engage with, or donate to, theatrical performances of Shakespeare's plays. Either encourage people to avoid, or only limitedly use until they're comfortable, things like No Fear Shakespeare. Case systems in English are long, long gone; we haven't had them for nearly a thousand years. The subjunctive is on the way out, but theoretically could be saved, if you can find reasons why people should care. Because that's the real rub: why use the subjunctive, when it's perfectly possible to express the same meaning simply through a conditional indicative? Why bother learning an extra mood, when the ones you already have do perfectly well?


I meant in that the arguments posited by the phrase are, in the dialect I speak, self-contradictory. "Any one" does make a claim about number, one which the plural form "dice" immediately contradicts.
Well, again, those aren't arguments, but terms--and I'll grant you that it is, in an unusually literal example of the phrase, "a contradiction in terms." But that's really all I feel like saying on the matter, as it's a minor and frankly not very important point.


I think there is definitely jargon that is meant to be obfuscatory (usually that of the sort that pluralizes words ending in the suffix "ism"), but I support your point about certain jargons, particularly in science and math. There's simply no way to consistently and precisely describe things which by their nature are outside ordinary ken without using language which is opaque to ordinary people.
Oh, I fully agree that some jargon is meant to be that, but in general I'd argue very little at least starts out that way. I'm unfamiliar with anything that uses plural "ism" words though; that is, in my experience, a person using a plural "ism" is mocking the use of the term (e.g. "omg AGEISMS" would be a mocking way to say "someone overly uptight about age-related things would probably call this ageism, even though it isn't.") I'd be curious to know what jargon would do that.

I would definitely grant that, for example, some continental philosophy intends a portion of obscurantism--though there it has other reasons for existing. (I do not mean to defend or attack it, as I am not even slightly a continental philosopher--I'm much more engaged with the analytic tradition--but ever since Heidegger it has had struggles with at least accusations of obscurantism.) I can give an example of unintentional obscurantism there where I know the intended meaning, if that's of interest to you.

[Studoku]

apparently dice is officially considered a correct singular now
As long as nobody says "dices" as the plural.

[Segev]

“People can misuse language,” is not a good defense of that misuse being accepted. I’m not arguing about dictionaries, here. I’m saying that the “literally” misuse is a misuse and should be corrected when come across, rather than defended as “linguistic drift” and anybody calling it out as wrong told they’re wrong for objecting.

It’s problematic when misused. It hinders communication. And I don’t care how prominent or well-respected some who have famously misused it, however long ago, may have been. That doesn’t justify the misuse nor it’s defense.

[Max_Killjoy]

“People can misuse language,” is not a good defense of that misuse being accepted. I’m not arguing about dictionaries, here. I’m saying that the “literally” misuse is a misuse and should be corrected when come across, rather than defended as “linguistic drift” and anybody calling it out as wrong told they’re wrong for objecting.

It’s problematic when misused. It hinders communication. And I don’t care how prominent or well-respected some who have famously misused it, however long ago, may have been. That doesn’t justify the misuse nor it’s defense.


Agreed.

The discriptivist school hurts its own credibility when it chooses to defend errors and drift that are actively harmful to the purpose of language.

[Pufferwockey]

"Dice" as singular grates a bit for me, since I was taught the singular as "die." But I understand what's meant when it's said/written, and that's the point of language so I don't complain about it. However, that's why I do complain about the growing usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively"--because there are now overlap situations in which I'm genuinely unsure whether the person I'm talking to means "literally" or "figuratively" when they says "literally."

I agree with the sentiment, and I usually don't complain, except in the context of threads labeled English questions. I will probably not even complain in that context going forward even though it really bugs me.


By the way, crotchety pedants, "they says" was intentional. That's the verb agreeing with the epicene third person singular pronoun "they."

I can see the logic there, but one conjugates verbs according the second person plural even when using it to mean second person singular. "What do you say?" not "What dost you say?" Which makes me think that the accepted form in English is to stick to conjugation of verbs referring to they as a plural even when using it as a singular pronoun.

[lesser_minion]

If I say, “This thread has me literally banging my head on my desk,” do you know if the physical part of my body atop my neck is materially impacting the surface on which I write and/or keep my computer, or if I’m merely expressing an intense irritation by intimating that it makes me feel like performing that activity, but I’m not actually doing so?

The statement "This thread has me banging my head on my desk", made on an internet forum, communicates the same meaning regardless of what you're doing in real life. If you're misusing 'literally' there, it's by using it at all -- completely independently of whether or not you were in fact literally banging your head on your desk.

If you're thinking of calling someone out for using 'literal' or 'literally' simply as an intensifier, then you are likely to be in a situation where the thing it modified is not likely to be literal -- in which case the harm done is clearly negligible. And if the "this is the real deal" meaning definitely needs to be communicated in a given context, the "just an intensifier" meaning is already far too well-known for "literally" alone to be a reliable way of doing that.

[Telok]

People are a problem. - D. Adams

Wouldn't some of this mean that you should embrace 'affect' and 'effect' as being completely interchangable since that is how many people use them in these days of auto-correct?

[Willie the Duck]

Wouldn't some of this mean that you should embrace 'affect' and 'effect' as being completely interchangable since that is how many people use them in these days of auto-correct?

Not when there are other more entertaining options for that particular issue. (https://xkcd.com/326/)

[Segev]

And if the "this is the real deal" meaning definitely needs to be communicated in a given context, the "just an intensifier" meaning is already far too well-known for "literally" alone to be a reliable way of doing that.

The trouble is that there IS no way to communicate that that doesn't wind up sounding like just more hyperbole, because the word you'd use to transmit that message - "literally" - has been overloaded with a meaning that entirely undermines its purpose as denoting that, yes, I mean exactly what I said with no hyperbole.

We have a lot of intensifiers. Using "literally" as one is not necessary, and can always be substituted with another, more accurately-chosen superlative. We lack synnonyms for "literally" that can be used in place of its actual meaning. It requires entire extra sentences, and risk of further miscommunication, to even begin to approach what the one word, used correctly and unambiguously, can get across.

For this reason, dismissing its incorrect usage as "acceptable linguistic drift" and scolding people who raise objection to it is bad practice. It is something that should be pushed back against, not something to be tolerated as "fine." Because it is a problem.

[lesser_minion]

For this reason, dismissing its incorrect usage as "acceptable linguistic drift" and scolding people who raise objection to it is bad practice. It is something that should be pushed back against, not something to be tolerated as "fine." Because it is a problem.

The point of language is communication, and if the language evolves such that particular words or phrases become confusing, it doesn't matter how 'correct' they may have been ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago.

[halfeye]

The point of language is communication, and if the language evolves such that particular words or phrases become confusing, it doesn't matter how 'correct' they may have been ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago.
Were you trying to say something?

[Tajerio]

I can see the logic there, but one conjugates verbs according the second person plural even when using it to mean second person singular. "What do you say?" not "What dost you say?" Which makes me think that the accepted form in English is to stick to conjugation of verbs referring to they as a plural even when using it as a singular pronoun.

Yeah, and to be frank, I mostly do it to needle a friend of mine who complains about singular "they" because it's grammatically incorrect. That said, I think there is a defense for it, because there are situations in which it can be genuinely unclear whether a plural or singular "they" is meant, and we have the verb conjugations in common usage to remove that particular source of confusion.

In a similar vein, I'm also all for the reintroduction of the second person plural.

[Unavenger]

[...]a friend of mine who complains about singular "they" because it's grammatically incorrect.

Chaucer wept.



EDIT: Incidentally, I do find it odd that the prescriptivists think that change is necessarily degradation. I also find it odd that they think that descriptivists and postmodernists are the same thing: the former is among the saner theories of language, the latter is a blight upon all things which remotely interface with sanity. I'll grant that much change in language is unhelpful, and some is even the driving force for rhetorical sleight of hand, but I don't think that using the phrase "One dice" - ostensibly the point of contention - has ever hindered communication, let alone torn the language apart.

Also, the ability to insert random neolomanteaus into your language because you don't care about being technically correct can actually aid communication, which is the whole point of using language in the first place.

EDIT EDIT: Also, at least IME, postmodernists tend to use what a prescriptivist would call correct grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. The problem is that they use this to create entirely syntactically-correct statements which are either banal and self-evident, or obviously wrong when taken out of the high-and-mighty trappings of an anti-intellectual's idea of intellectual language.

(PS: You can have my Oxford Comma when you pry it out out of my cold, dead hands.)

[FrogInATopHat]

As long as nobody says "dices" as the plural.

I created an account solely to say that this is the pluralisation I use both to refer to my dice buying habits and also because 'playing dices' is what my daughter calls it when I have a session.

She's not yet 4, so she can be as descriptivist as she wants.

[FrogInATopHat]

Chaucer wept.




Probably, but a few tears are small payment for my having to read that thing.

Still, singular they has been around since 1365. That's long enough that I'm not sure how even our most prescriptivist of friends could really object.



(PS: You can have my Oxford Comma when you pry it out out of my cold, dead hands.)

/kneels/

You have my sword.

[Khedrac]

I created an account solely to say that this is the pluralisation I use both to refer to my dice buying habits and also because 'playing dices' is what my daughter calls it when I have a session.

She's not yet 4, so she can be as descriptivist as she wants.

I can think of worse reasons for creating an account - welcome to the posting side of the forums.

[FrogInATopHat]

I can think of worse reasons for creating an account - welcome to the posting side of the forums.

I've been tempted a few other times over the years, but always finally reminded myself that it wasn't worth it just to jump into an argument.

[Segev]

/kneels/

You have my sword.

And my pen!

[Lord Torath]

(PS: You can have my Oxford Comma when you pry it out out of my cold, dead hands.)
/kneels/

You have my sword.
And my pen!But not my Oxford Comma! I'm keeping it for myself. You'll just have to make do with your own! :smallwink:

[Max_Killjoy]

But not my Oxford Comma! I'm keeping it for myself. You'll just have to make do with your own! :smallwink:


Have you ever seen the image that shows the difference between "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin." and "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin." ?

[Unavenger]

Have you ever seen the image that shows the difference between "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin." and "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin." ?

This book is dedicated to my parents, God, and Ayn Rand.

[Segev]

Yeah, I don't understand the resistance to adding that one little bit of punctuation that both matches the typical cadance of speech, and renders the communication of the written sentence so very much clearer by removing some significant ambiguity.

To be fair, though, one could make an argument that, "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin," is actually improperly punctuated if it's meant to say that JFK and Stalin are the strippers whoever the antecedent of "we" is invited. Nobody uses the colon properly anymore, though. Poor, neglected colon. (It would, if you meant it as it could be misread without the Oxford Comma, be properly written as: "We invited the strippers: JFK and Stalin.")

However, the use of a comma in such cases is so natural for normal speech presentation that refusing to use the Oxford comma after JFK is just stubbornness.

[Willie the Duck]

But not my Oxford Comma! I'm keeping it for myself. You'll just have to make do with your own! :smallwink:

Personally, I have stronger opinions regarding the Oxford Semicolon. :smalltongue: