I love language. I love learning new words, I love learning new languages (I’ve got German, I’m now working on Norwegian - I’ve got a thang for Germanic languages). I am a traditionalist, however, when it comes to the actual usage of a language. I like set rules providing speakers to know the precise meaning and pronunciation of each and every word (barring random abberant words like, “enough”, etc.). So it grates on my nerves to hear someone mispronounce a word. I usually let it go, it’s not my place to correct peoples grammer, but I couldn’t resist with Jason last night at work.
Jason is a coworker of mine whom I often butt heads with. My relationship with Jason is a complex one, and is an entire post on its own, but to simplify the matter just realize that if there is room for disagreement about something, we usually do. We have similar hobbies/interests we just usually like opposite things within those interests. We both like Horror movies; I like slasher flicks and creature features, he likes Asian horror. We both like Gaming; I like gritty, “low-fantasy” games, where he likes High Fantasy, Anime-style games.
This all started when I pointed out to Jason, several months back, a form I was running that used the word “overage”. Never having heard this word before, and thinking that “surplus” is a fine-and-dandy word, I brought “overage” to his attention. He firmly told me that overage IS a word. I continued to disagree with him for weeks, until finally conceeding the point that overage IS in fact a word (though a goofy, unnecessary one). Well, the other night he brought up overage again and I told him, “If you keep bringing up ‘overage’, I’m going to have to bring up your pronunciation”. You see, Jason has a rather unique way of saying various words - some to the point that I cannot understand what word he’s using. The major word in dispute last night was the word “piton”. A piton is a spike that is hammered into rock and used to tie rope to in rock climbing. He pronounced it pi’ ton with an “i” like in “is”. The overall pronunciation sounded like the word “pittance”. I have always heard it pronounced “pee’ ton” - he used the word several times before I realize which word he was using. Like I said, I don’t generally correct peoples grammar, but his arguement was that I’m not factoring in for regional variances and that some places in the country say words different. To which I reply (though in the actual arguement I had given up by this time…) of course, people in different parts of the country say things different - there’s always going to be regional dialects that can’t be helped, that’s how we get “see-ment” vs. “cement”. But just because most of the South says “see-ment” doesn’t make it the proper way to pronounce the word. That’s what the arguement was about, the proper way to pronounce a word, not “the way some people say it.”
This is the difficult and frustrating part of arguing with Jason - he’s an excellent obfuscater. He rarely stays on topic in an arguement - bringing in tangenital “facts” and non-sequitur into the arguement - that make him more or less right, but right about something that wasn’t even the focus of the arguement.
But I digress…
…actually, I started writing this post so long ago I really don’t know where I was going with it. So what does the general public think? Should a countries language be preserved as best as possible? In what form? Language is a constantly changing being, new words being created and others falling out of use - should we strive to maintain the original integrity of languages or let them go the way of Latin - morphing into something wholly alien from the original? And what about the case of American-English vs. British-English? Two completely seperate languages, or are they both tied into the same rules and should both follow the same ruleset? Do we need to start adding a “u” to color?
