XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.english.usage

That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

-- When i saw this, i felt a bit a better about being hated by (Dr.) ACB


Re: Virginia Woolf died (28-3-1941)
On 3/29/2024 2:46 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

On 2024-03-29 09:35:59 +0000, Ross Clark said:

Walked into the Ouse River after filling her coat pockets with stones.

That's worthy of a Darwin Award.

It was three weeks before her body was found.

Crystal quotes at length from a radio talk (29-4-1937) in a series
called "Words Fail Me".

She says:
"In the old days, when English was a new language, writers could
invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent
new words...but we cannot use them because the language is old. You
cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very
obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is
part of a sentence."

Can anyone make sense of this for me?

I can sort of understand that, but not to the point of trying to
translate it into English.

Who are the "we" and the "you" in that passage?

They're the same person!

Further:
"To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of
the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to
invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we ahsll come to it,
is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can
do with the English language as it is."

Again the "you" and the "we" (well, "our").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf

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