(07-23-2020 08:46 AM)stinkfist Wrote: (07-23-2020 07:17 AM)miko33 Wrote: (07-23-2020 12:11 AM)JRsec Wrote: The bottom line is this:
If they can't learn, or refuse to learn, we will elevate their ignorance as our culture. And this has been going for decades. It is why Webster's now lists commonly misspelled words as alternative spellings. It is why RAP lyrics are called poetry.
When was the last rime you heard proper grammar from you local TV news team? Subject verb agreement and when to say I or me are all but gone like the dropped ly at the end of adverbs. "She danced pretty." The sad thing is that the ignorance of the language is so appalling today that you will find that you don't even pick up on the mistakes when you hear them made. I once heard a local publisher exclaim "She done that already." when asked about a task assigned to the advertising manager.
We can't excel when we accept ignorance as culture. It's just that simple. Excellence always seeks betterment. Laziness seeks the lowest common denominator. We have a sorry, lazy, excuse making society. Our days are numbered.
To explain to people why it is critical to excel one need only give this fact. The sun will go supernova. And when it does all life on earth ceases. We will never truly explore space if we travel at our slowest learner's pace. Every minute we lose trying to fix the problems of the slowest is a minute lost securing the destiny of the human race. And globally when we cease to pursue excellence we fall behind and in our world falling behind means you will be conquered.
And remember this, when we started focusing on the importance of education we started highlighting the importance of ignorance to keep educators important. The more they get paid the less they teach and the more they justify their next raise. The raises shouldn't be based on increased need for education. They should be based on results.
I agree wrt the refusal to learn and/or forced quotas have resulted in lower quality students who can't do the work that prior generations were capable of. I think much of it is due to the expansion of colleges and universities in order to "feed the beast" to keep the money trains rolling.
Regarding language, it's always a fascinating thing to study. What you described made me instinctively reflect on changes to languages over time and how people may have reacted to these changes. It would be awesome to go back in time to see if there were people who were shocked to see how Latin was degrading around them in the Iberian peninsula, Gaul and Italian peninsulas after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I've read more recently that German was starting to lose some of the cases for possessive, but not sure about that since language and grammar are not my primary course of study. Granted modern English was created from a blending of Old English (or was it an Anglo-Saxon ancestor language?) and French to create a new language that dropped a bunch of cases for nouns, pronouns and verbs that were largely retained in German.
Thee, thou, thine and thy were dropped from English and replaced by you and yours.
agree....the development of language over time is a very interesting study...
I'm one that loves playing with <sic>...it's why Twain is my fave...
Words have meaning and nuance gentlemen. The country's which achieve the most are the country's in which the language has the most precise meaning. When language breaks down meaning breaks down and communication breaks down with it. It leads to mistakes and decline.
I give you the example of those who merely guess at the made up names of pharmaceuticals working third shifts in hospitals when patients families are seldom there. They frequently manage to give the wrong drugs to the wrong patients by misreading both the drug's name and that of the patient. When the mistakes were found due to an investigation into the death of a patient they found that similarly sounding names were the cause of the confusion. Well that an the ignorance of the third shift nurses.
This is one reason I resent the cultural misappropriation of language. Taking a drag on a fag in 1920 meant taking a puff on a cigarette. I don't have to tell you what it means now. Stink that is part of idiocracy. "Full latte?" And the word "gay" can hardly be associated with the homosexual lifestyle. Confusion!
So I challenge your and Miko's assumptions.
Germany has issues, precision in language is not one of them. England has taken a long but stead decline with civilization. It began with the colonization of the British Isle by foreign cultures. The language evolved from a mish mash of Latin, Nordic, and French and into many different dialects within the isles before they colonized the world. It was wonderfully descriptive because of it and almost proved to be the counter of my argument here. But the KJV of the Bible, and the Constitution do not translate well into the modern version of our language because the nuance of 1604 and the late 1700's does not translate well to our times. This leads the young to think of the documents as antiquated and irrelevant, when they've never been more prescient.
That said thou shalt not COVID anything that is they neighbor's. Not his wife. Not his man servant, nor maid servant, not his ox nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's might not be such a bad misreading.
For that matter it might not be bad to understand the 2nd amendment this way, "You got the right to pack heat. And nobody can look through your **** unless they judge say so."
