Bran-new
Check out this shit I found on the Unabridged Merriam-Webster website today:
Main Entry: brand-new
Variant(s): also bran-new \brann(y)ü, -raan- sometimes -ndn-\Function: adjective
Etymology: brand-new from brand + new; bran-new, alteration of brand-new
: fresh from the manufacturer : conspicuously new and unusedbrand-new pigskin wallet -- Frances Crane> brand-new approach -- New Yorker>
"Bran-new"? No way. Merriam-Webster is being far too permissive here. Descriptivism is all well and good, but sometimes a lexicographer has to just put his foot down and say, "I don't care if people do say that. They're retards, it's wrong, and it's not going in."
This is exactly what I'm talking about when people sometimes say, "But it's in the dictionary," and I answer, "Then the dictionary is wrong." It may sound pompous and pedantic to contradict such a hallowed source, but sometimes it is wrong.
7 Comments:
speaking of bad word-things, and specifically of words not to be used, mores specifically banned words. I would like to add the phrase *dark side points gained* to the list. That one's getting old real fast.
Have you been playing too much KOTOR, or are people actually using this as slang now?
This one's worse.
Pretty soon I'm just going to have to quit the English language.
My God. You weren't kidding.
Who actually talks like that? Does the dictionary also allow for "aks" in place of "ask" now, too? Yikes.
Tell me about it.
The Swedish Lamguage Board in about 1995 recommended that "for the sake of consistency" and "to avoid confusion", Swedes were no longer suposed to say two thousand for the year after 1999, but twenty-hundred.
Absurd, since no other country in the whole wide world does this and not a single person in Sweden had used this form before this bizarre recommendation.
If you think English is going to hell, just be glad you're not a Swedish-speaker...
It's just I see DSP as slowly creeping up in Web postings and I don't like where it's going. Sort of a pre-emptive banning.
I agree though, "nother" is way wosre then DSP, since it shows the degradation of human kind.
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