A beautiful mind

Monday, February 16, 2009

An educational post.

I was chatting with bff, asking her about her picnic when I was astounded.

"No we dont sweat. Animal sweat, Human perspire. we perspired"

I've never heard of this before. What's so astounding was the way she put it across. Even after I tried correcting her. 100% confidence. 101% after the backing of Mother of all grammar, Huiwen. I've heard of people trying to improve the use of language by saying we don describe people as fat. Fat is used on pig. we use obese on 'fat' people. However, this was on no basis. It was to promote the use of 'obese' over 'fat'. This is what I found.

"Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow"

The goal of "Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow" was, of course, to encourage the use of "glow" as a more refined word than "sweat" or even, in that more delicate age, "perspire."

Perspire" is, however, usually considered a more refined word than "sweat," which is certainly worth knowing. That distinction is, of course, entirely arbitrary from a linguistic standpoint, but English has a long history of granting Latinate (or Anglo-French) forms higher social status than Anglo-Saxon words. Many of the words we use for livestock ("cow," "pig," "sheep," etc.), for example, are short, blunt Anglo-Saxonisms of the sort used by medieval peasants, while the names of the finished products ("veal," "beef," "mutton," "pork," etc.) are rooted in the Anglo-French of the gentry who could actually afford the meat.

Now I must say, this has more ground than "my primary teacher taught me this also" However, you people/girls can challenge it also. If you can find a source to back u up. It's open. Nowadays, I'm easily annoyed at poor grammar inproper usage of words. Maybe due to influence of Huiwen. But what's more frustrating is the learning of 'proper english' is hampered by the inappropriate usage at times. We're misled into thinking some uses are right just cos it was used in that way on someone's blog/the internet. To Improve ourselves, we need moral courage to correct our friends when they're not using the right words at times instead of letting it passed. In a subtle way of course. Mocking and sneering have no help in learning.

Saying this, Of course I understand this blog is not in perfect grammar all the time. So please dont correct me via the tagboard, if not it'd be frigging full of long sentences copied from my text. Unless I'm displaying a complete misunderstanding of concept or the word, please pardon me.

If not, Always feel free to correct me. =)