Used to & Use to:
Why do we say things like “it use to be that„ and “they're used to„ in place of things like “it once was that„ and “they're accustomed to„? It's profoundly offensive that a synonym for “utilize„ is shoehorned into serving these purposes.WRT:
For some reason, the options English gives you when you want to say something like “with respect to„ are dogshit. There's no way to just give a single word and have it serve only as a piece of pure grammar while being unambiguous in what purpose it was called upon to serve.
Nearly every possible alternative possesses an emotional connotation, which is problematic since the situations which call for it tend to also call for neutrality. “In terms of„ is really nice and I use it wherever possible, but there are cases where it's simply logically inappropriate. “Regarding„ and “Concerning„ can be better than “in terms of„ sometimes, but in addition to the same (admittedly less-extreme) problem of connotation, it often isn't clear that this is the function you're trying to serve by using them. “With respect to„ is probably the best catch-all option for solving this problem of clarity, but in addition to it having the most extreme problem of connotation, it too can really falter in scenarios where you have to write really complex sentences. The acronym “WRT„ is pretty nice in solving both problems, but A) it sucks to so-heavily rely on an acronym to serve such a basic grammatical function, as it isn't a real word, and it isn't an option in live conversation; B) people often need to resort to google it to figure out what it means; C) it's arguably faux pas to use “WRT„ in non-math contexts; and D) even though this is the option which is least likely to be mistaken in practice, it still sucks that the word “respect„ is the one whose literal meaning is the most irrelevant to what's trying to be conveyed.
To solve D, maybe “WRT„ could be used to mean “with regards to„ instead of “with respect to„. As a global solution to most issues, maybe a French or Latin loan word like “apropos„ could be adopted, but this makes issue B even more severe since there's no field like math where it's established tradition to use it.Typesetters' Quotation:
The sole reason Americans use Typesetters' Quotation over Logical Quotation is that they think it looks better, but any time that anybody thinks about it for two seconds, they realize that logical quotation is the only option that's at all defensible from a perspective of practical considerations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logical_quotation_on_WikipediaRead the talk section of the wiki article. Although the article’s case against Typesetters' Quotation is brilliant, it's clearly fair to describe “Typesetters' Quotation„ as being American. Frankly, this is another one of those reasons that I regard American culture as being offensively uncouth/tacky/déclassé. It would be one thing (but still insufferable) if this was just some kind of cultural norm, but it’s just obnoxious how this is enforced in the style guides of American institutions and how teachers/professors will take points off the papers of any student who rightly decides to ignore the practice. This nonsense should be discarded with extreme prejudice, and any professors or institutions which enforce this practice should be subject to steep financial penalties from the federal government.
I think I have a compromise however.
How about instead of having quotation "look like this" or «look like this», or „look like this“, we had quotation “look like this„?
This way, any punctuation that comes after looks more like it belongs and doesn't have that “lonely dot„ off in space by itself that Americans seem to irrationally hate so much.
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I utterly despise acronyms, it is like engaging with a sms girl.
It also makes life very difficult for non native English speakers, however this might be a positive in your view, as it encrypts your language for outsiders.
We've certainly seen many a fbi agent stumble over internal know to know lexicon, so its usefulness can't be denied.
I also am somewhat annoyed by the ever increasing reach towards latin for language solutions.
But hey im just germanicist to the point of wanting words like control be written with a K and that that K is written as a ᚲ, but a bit enlarged obviously.
Feel you in a way though, especially on the use of use haha, and punctuation but again im not a native English speaker so i dont have much of centre point on it to begin with.