Grammar that makes you cringe

[T42]

Gawd. "Comprised of " stems from ignorance, just as "could of" takes its origin in people writing what they think they hear without ever having learnt basic English.  Both are simply wrong.

[Voyager]

I could commit murder when I see or hear 'could of' instead of 'could have' !

[Voyager]

I could commit murder when I see or hear 'could of' instead of 'could have' !

[Steph]

Arithmetic this time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31152569

Five out of twenty does not equal "One third"

[hellymedic]

This is more usage than grammar,  combined with my dirty mind, from a ride report on a local CTC Facebook page today.

<<...her blond hair gleaming in the morning sun as she bent over her bike examining her front wheel, which had punctured - just in time to have a trio of male members to fix it.>>

I keep thinking of three willies wielding tyre levers...

[T42]

King Dick tyre levers, of course.

Oh, and in the normal way of things wheels do not puncture anything, but tyres are regularly punctured.

Ah well.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not far from here I just read an entire thread wherein every single post discussed the problem of nether garments "chaffing". Nobody suggested telling the buggers to shut up.

[nicknack]

I could commit murder when I see or hear 'could of' instead of 'could have' !

I could commit murder when I see or hear 'could of' instead of 'could have' !

You were 4 days late.

[Wowbagger]

Things are either feasible, or unfeasible.

[T42]

Never seen or heard unfeasible. "Not feasible", yes.  Had to check Chambers, though (I have it on the computer): years of talking furrin muddies the waters.

Anyway, I came in here to gripe about underway.  It's under way, two words, said of a vessel that has way on her.  Under weigh is similarly crap, but worse crap. Trust me, my father was an inveterate armchair sailor.

[Pickled Onion]

Things are either feasible, or unfeasible.

That's interesting - The Oxford dictionary defines unfeasible differently to infeasible: the difference between impractical and impracticable.

Presumably something that was feasible can later be described as feased?

[Steph]

Don't fease the Reaper?

[drossall]

I would have said infeasible. I don't suppose there's much call for "unfeasible". Strictly, there isn't that much call for "impractical" either, except that people keep using it when they mean "impracticable". You don't tend to need to be told that something is impractical.

[Wombat]

Never seen or heard unfeasible. "Not feasible", yes.  Had to check Chambers, though (I have it on the computer): years of talking furrin muddies the waters.

Anyway, I came in here to gripe about underway.  It's under way, two words, said of a vessel that has way on her.  Under weigh is similarly crap, but worse crap. Trust me, my father was an inveterate armchair sailor.

Didn't he find that the upholstery tended to get wet?

[pcolbeck]

Never seen or heard unfeasible. "Not feasible", yes.  Had to check Chambers, though (I have it on the computer): years of talking furrin muddies the waters.

Good god man have you never read Viz? "Buster Gonad - the boy with the unfeasibly large testicles" that was a classic comic strip.

And here he is gracing the nose of an RAF Jaguar bomber during Gulf War I

[T42]

Viz? Never even heard of it.  Eagle and Hotspur, that was my youthful reading-matter.

[Mr Larrington]

When some outfit launched a weekly rag aimed at Babbage-Engine Operations types the advertised it not in "Computer Weekly" but in "Viz" as they reckoned it to be the one publication guaranteed to be read in every computer room in the country.

[Bledlow]

Not really grammar . . . .

but I get pissed off when English-speakers who don't properly understand foreign words use them in English, especially when the distorted English usage then becomes widely adopted.

'Chai' is just TEA! And 'garam' just means HOT! And 'garam chai' is nice simple hot tea! If you're selling a spicy tea mixture, there's another word for it, one you've seen in every Indian restaurant in the bloody country, & you may even have on a label on your shelves at home, usually preceded by 'garam'.

How'd you like to order a pint of nice refreshing beer & find that it's served hot, with spices, by someone who thinks that what 'beer' means?

There are other examples, but this is the most recent to have provoked me.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Yebbut, tea in India is usually served in a way that's quite different from typical British tea. Small cup, very sweet, with cardamom - and other spices, but that's predominant. So it makes sense, in a British context, to call that 'chai'.

As for masala, which I presume is the other word you're referring to, it might translate as 'spice' but in use it's more like 'mixture of spices or herbs'. It doesn't have to be spicy in the chilli, peppery sense. Garam, of course, means hot in both senses. If you consider 'garam chai' as an English phrase with Hindi origins, it kind of makes sense. If you think it's Hindi, it's a bit silly. Pretty much every language borrows words from others and distorts them from their original meanings.

[Jaded]

Can't find the foreign menu thread. If there is one.

[T42]

^^^ reminiscent of a bilingual menu we once saw where escalope de volaille was translated as fowl collop.

[The French Tandem]

Poor translation, he said?

(click to show/hide)

Warning!!! NSFW image.

[T42]

Ever bought a box of Crapsy Fruit cereal?

[Bledlow]

Yebbut, tea in India is usually served in a way that's quite different from typical British tea. Small cup, very sweet, with cardamom - and other spices, but that's predominant. So it makes sense, in a British context, to call that 'chai'.

Except that we've already borrowed it from Hindi/Urdu, as another word for plain ordinary tea, many years ago. "A cuppa char" was still in common use in the 1960s.

I'm pretty sure that 'chai' for spiced tea in English isn't even from any Indian language, directly, but an Americanism, introduced into the USA by a certain Seattle-based purveyor of beverages which used it as a marketing term, I believe, & from there to here. That's a damn good reason to abhor it.

BTW, in my experience, Indian tea sold in places where the customers were almost all ordinary Indians (non-tourist locations such as roadside halts & railway stations away from the main tourist routes) & was generally very lightly or even un-spiced 30 years ago. Hippy cafes for foreigners sold much spicier tea (& the worse for it) than I ever bought from anyone who was selling to Indians.

[Cudzoziemiec]

But if you're going to say that chai and char are the same word, then so is tea. And thé, Tee, herbata and so on, which will all likely be served in a slightly different way as a matter of course.

However it reached us in its present incarnation, it's clearly a marketing term, though not one I'd associate with any particular company. Not sure I ever drank any tourist tea in India, except maybe in Yercaud. (Maybe it's time to launch a marketing campaign for badam milk.  )

[Bledlow]

You're saying that assorted variants of thé, tea etc. from numerous languages exist as words in everyday English with generally understood different meanings, not terms used only by a few pretentious retailers & their customers? And ditto for variants of cha, chaa, chai, etc? Really?

I think you don't associate it with any particular firm because by the time it got here it had spread beyond the first one, but it looks very much as if it started on the US west coast in one chain.

Fashions change, in India as everywhere else. Tea may have become spicier. Also, there were marked regional differences in many things when I went there, including food & drink (in many ways travelling between parts of India was like travelling between European countries, back then), & I wouldn't be surprised if that's still true. Coffee that was common in Kerala was almost unobtainable in Delhi, for example, & IIRC tea tasted different.