Charlie: At the risk of outing myself, I do think that you have expressed an idea that I was only fuzzily trying to ponder. Have you been there before me, too? Thanks for the leap!
The poetics of your conclusion are not meant for all, but (to quote the Kinks) “You Really Got Me.”
And speaking of “me”, can you please post your (poetic and otherwise) thoughts on the difference between “I” and “me”?[/quote]
I apologize, IYouThem. In that post, I conjured up the ghost of a much younger self, and was being a little on the facetious side (although I’ve occasionally had thoughts like those expressed in the post). Those kinds of ideas are certainly worthy of discussion, though. I think you and yuli were doing a very good job on that. I’m the one who fuzzily tries to ponder.
Charlie: At the risk of outing myself, I do think that you have expressed an idea that I was only fuzzily trying to ponder. Have you been there before me, too? Thanks for the leap!
The poetics of your conclusion are not meant for all, but (to quote the Kinks) “You Really Got Me.”
And speaking of “me”, can you please post your (poetic and otherwise) thoughts on the difference between “I” and “me”?[/quote]
I apologize, IYouThem. In that post, I conjured up the ghost of a much younger self, and was being a little on the facetious side (although I’ve occasionally had thoughts like those expressed in the post). Those kinds of ideas are certainly worthy of discussion, though. I think you and yuli were doing a very good job on that. I’m the one who fuzzily tries to ponder.
Thanks for the compliment. [/quote]
No need for apology. Facetious or not, I like your ghostly younger self. Maybe I’m trying to do the same kind of conjuring!
Later … and again, eh?!
It’s a fixed expression. If a person uses it they are generally referring to the fact that often when people gain a bit of knowledge they proceed as if they had a lot. It is a dangerous tendancy because when people think they know about a subject they will often leap in and mess about with things they don’t understand. On the other hand, people who understand that they don’t have a lot of knowledge generally proceed carefully, if at all.
I guess I’m just a [ _____], but I wish to find out what some people think about (dogmatically or conceptually) observing rules of grammar, and whether (or if) the rules (old and/or new) need some rethinking.
So, here’s an even easier issue. (And I hope the moderators will not split this off, as I think it is a related part of this thread.)
In today’s (Oct 18, 2011) Taipei Times, p. 10, the following headline appeared:
“Olympus shares plunge after CEO’s ouster”
It is the word “ouster” that I am concerned about. (And this is not the first time this grammar has been used this way by the Taipei Times.)
To me, the suffix “-er” has historically (and meaningfully) been appended to a verb to indicate a person or thing that does what the verb means.
Ex:
“run” is a verb, “runner” is a person who runs
“cook” is a verb, “cooker” is a thing that cooks (e.g., a rice cooker)
So, I think the headline would be better stated as:
“Olympus shares plunge after CEO’s ousting”
I realize I could do some research as to why this change in grammar has appeared. I am not that interested in why. I truly think that “ousting” grammatically preserves the meaning of what happened - way better than “ouster” does.
And the opposite of “pro” is “con”, so the opposite of Progress is Congress.
Well, that one holds up, anyway.
But generalizing about what a certain prefix or suffix always means, even when it’s not standing as that particular morpheme, doesn’t make much sense. It’s about as sensible as saying a “table” has “tabs” because “tab” is part of the word.
When the morphemes are actually there and doing something sensible, fine.
But when they are not – as in the “tab/table” example – obviously it makes no sense to do so.
There are some morphemes that are not productive, or which no longer reflect their original meaning, or which are “exceptions”, etc. – and I don’t see the value at railing against the fact that the language uses that word even though the morpheme in it isn’t doing what it’s “supposed to be” doing, as in the OP’s example about “ouster”.
And that still holds today - but it is not the only thing that should come to mind when seeing words that end in “-er”, because it is not the only pattern that applies…
“ham” is a verb, “hammer” is a person who hams
“sum” is a verb, “summer” is a thing that “sums”
“bum” is a verb, “bummer” is a person who bums
“fire” is a verb, “firer” is a person who fires others
Nothing wrong with your version (you won’t see me question it if you use it) - but why better?
Plenty of native English speakers in many parts of the use “ouster” exactly the way the Taipei Times used it in your example - is that endorsement not good enough?
The point is, there must be thousands of words that won’t quite fit into one ordinary pattern or another. Picking out one as if it were somehow a meaningful example isn’t umm, meaningful. The fact is, there is a noun, ouster, with well-established usage.
ironlady is saying that the suffix -er, as it is being used in ouster in your earlier example, does not stand for agency (i. e., it doesn’t stand for a person or thing that does what the verb means). It stands for something else.
The online version of Webster’s New World College Dictionary gives the etymology of oust as follows:
Here, among other things, is the etymology (given as a probable etymology, not a certain one) given by the old 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary:
I think many French infinitives end in -er. So it appears that ouster comes from the infinitive form of its French ancestor.
Anglo-Norman (a kind of Norman French) was the prestigious language (I don’t know the linguistic term) in England for, I guess, about 500 years (I could be wrong about the length of time). Here are a couple of snippets about it from Wikipedia:
To show the prestige of French in England at that time: To the usual keeper of a pig, it was a pig. To the usual eater of the pig, it was pork. To the usual keeper of a cow, it was a cow. To the usual eater of the cow, it was beef. And there’s also fowl and poultry. (I’m speaking of the ancestry of these words, not their current forms.)
Now, me, I know next to nothing about the science of this sort of thing, me. But if someone had spiked my coffee a few days ago with a substance that made a person naively optimistic, or if I’d never read anything in this forum before, then on reading the title of this thread, I would have thought something like,
Yeah, that’s what I would have thought as I was opening this thread–if someone had spiked my coffee or if I’d been a newbie.
Well, you know, those things are pretty much practical takes on grammar. Okay, maybe not Chomsky. But talking about how it relates to teaching – not nearly rarefied and cool enough.
And many thanks for the elucidation on the history of “ouster” and the French connection. Seeing/understanding “ouster” as a borrowed French infinitve is THE supreme explanation for me! That’s it!! Why didn’t other people mention it …?
I would only want to add one more name/idea to the above: Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.
Maybe Celtic’s influence on English grammar is common knowledge in the UK or something, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of this, and I do find it fascinating.
