this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Sir or madam or otherwise, that is not how words work.
I once saw a garden center with the french word "soleil" (pronounced "so-lay") in the name, everyone in the area pronounced it "so-leel", but just because the French don't kick down the doors and correct people doesn't make "so-leel" any less incorrect. There is a correct and an incorrect way to say words, frequency of usage is irrelevant.
Look friend, be wrong if you want. That's your prerogative.
The french didn't create the word "soleel", the founder of the garden center didn't name his business "soleel", the word "soleel" does not exist. Everyone who uses the word "soleel" is wrong. Usage is irrelevant, the creator gets to decide. Period. It's jif. Be wrong or be right, your call. Just own your decision.
I learned a new word today that I think can help here by way of a story. "Ooftish" is the word, it's a Yiddish word that translates in English to money. And I don't know a lot of Yiddish words, but I've been getting into etymology so I read more about it. The word comes from a phrase that means "money on the table", and the phrase was pronounced roughly "gelt af tish" (from one snapshot in time, anyway, according to wordsmith.org, this isn't meant to be an absolute) where gelt is the word for money and tish is the word for table.
That made me wonder, how did this word "ooftish" come to be, because there was a word in the ancestor phrase that literally meant money already. One idea: someone that maybe didn't speak the language but had been exposed to it heard someone say "gelt af tish," understood enough context to know money was being spoken about, and took the part of the phrase they remembered and started using it to refer to money. And then it caught on. That doesn't have to be true to make my point, because the next part is really the important part of the thought experiment.
Imagine this person starts using this word "ooftish" and it catches on as an inside joke among friends. They teach their kids, it spreads, more people are now using the word. It's still a local thing, but it's catching on. Another couple generations, and it's become the defacto in-group way for a population to refer to money. But they're all talking about a prepositional phrase referring to some unnamed thing that is situated on a table, and they've all long-forgotten the birth of the phrase and never use the word "gelt" at all anymore. Let me ask you: Is that entire population wrong today for using the word "ooftish" even though it is a linguistic travesty in this hypothetical world? Or does it make sense for them to keep using the word, because they all know what they mean when they use it and it would actually be more complicated to try and backfill this word with the more linguistically pure word that was used before?
You can't use logic like "everyone else is wrong but me" about language, as satisfying as it would be sometimes to do so. We use language to communicate, and if we're trying to get a message across, we communicate in the way that best accomplishes the need at hand - sharing an idea with others. That means the way words are used by a population is more important than grandstanding over how anyone thinks particular words should be used.
Bro it's fucking jif get over it.
Bro it's fucking GIF tho
Wow. Now you're just being deliberately obtuse and vindictive. You are not worth continuing this conversation with. Grow up.
That's kind of how language works. If everybody in the local area understand each other perfectly fine, then it has served its purpose.
Theres' a town in my region called "Purcellville", and everybody not from the area including Google will pronounce it as "PurCELL-ville" as spelled out, but every single resident within the town will insist its "Perc-UH-ville". Which is the "wrong" pronunciation. But the people in that town literally don't give AF.
Whether the people give af or not is irrelevant. If the founder(s) of the town intended it to be pronounced Purcellville, the people are wrong. If the founder(s) said percuhville, then they're not wrong.
The founders are long dead and nobody alive has ever heard them say the name. That's how language changes from one into another over time. That's how we got all the thousands of unique languages on Earth.
First, it's an accent. Then over time, it becomes heavier and heavier until it eventually becomes a brand new language. Words may even be borrowed and used from other languages and changed as well.