[The Man]

"Aren't I?"

Having thought about it, how did we get to this contraction? It's not obviously subjunctive tense (if we weren't using a contraction, we'd say "am I not?"), but it's considered grammatically correct, as far as I know. What gives? (This is the sort of question that I doubt it's possible to Google very well.)


...I forgot to reply to the responses to my first question.

Originally Posted by erimir

the difference you're noticing is connected to etymology, which is historical

That's why I ultimately went with the history forum.

Originally Posted by erimir

But this is just an imperfect heuristic for avoiding words that won't be understood, because they're technical jargon or overly "learned". Plenty of foreign words in English are common and easily understood. (For example, "plenty", "foreign", "common" and "easy" all come from French.)

If you perceive the word as foreign, on the other hand, that might be a better indicator that it's less likely to be understood than whether it is foreign. (But if you intentionally avoided non-Germanic words in English and used archaic Germanic words, you would be using less foreign words but be harder to understand.)

Generally speaking, I find hard and fast rules like that for writing to be misguided. Elements of Style contains a lot of stupid rules, for example.

Orwell himself didn't actually intend it to be a hard-and-fast rule; he explicitly closed out his list of advice with, "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous", and he prefaced it with an indication that he meant it as general guidelines "that one can rely on when instinct fails" rather than a sort of thing to adhere to slavishly (and, perhaps more importantly, a long paragraph about how one must "let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about"). It's just easier to remember the rules the way he phrased them than it would be if they were "Avoid using foreign words unless they're used so commonly that people don't think of them as foreign words" or "Avoid using long words where short ones would do unless it's easier to understand that way". (And he wrote, "never use a foreign phrase...if you can think of an everyday English equivalent"; I'd contend that if a word/phrase of foreign origin is used so commonly that people don't realise it's foreign, it probably is an "everyday English equivalent" by this point.)

But I agree that The Elements of Style contains a lot of downright awful writing advice. I don't know what Orwell thought of that book, but I suspect he hated it, though I'm having difficulty explaining precisely why I think this. The Elements of Style seems the exact sort of hidebound, stuffy style guide that produces bland, unimaginative prose, and Orwell decries such prose throughout "Politics and the English Language". Perhaps it is best to quote him at length:

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.

I think everyone who speaks or writes English should reread this essay often.

Originally Posted by erimir

A German word like backpfeifengesicht is unlikely to enter common use

...which is unfortunate, because how else are we to describe Ted Cruz and Martin Shkreli?

Also, while I clicked the [thanks] button, I should probably have said something more formal as well, given how detailed that response was.