Useless information
 

So i was reading through some of the news sites i check daily and although this is very usless knowledge i was quite surprised to see that there are 1 billion words in the English language. You know, when i was in school trying to learn spanish i thought that was hard but can you imaging people trying to learn english with all of our weird slang and things like synonyms, etc. I bet it would be pretty hard. :dizzy:

English Language Hits 1 Billion Words – http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193197,00.html

I love it!

Thank you! I remember one of my Jr. High English teachers (that's what Middle School was called back when I was in 7th grade) telling us that there were X-hundred-million words in English, but I don't remember the exact number. I'm so glad to now have a number to use!

And what a number it is!

But you know what's so sad? Even with a billion words at their disposal, many American teens (and adults, too) still can't find a substitutes for the words "like" and the f-word ("It's, like, so f'in cold outside"), or the increasingly ever-present "y'know".

It would be interesting to see how many of those billion words the average American teenager (and adult) uses in a typical day. I'm betting it would be less than 1,000. Sad, eh?

Anyway, thanks for the info!

Neat! I'd be interested to know how many words the average English-speaking person knows.

it's easier for the non-english speaking learn & understand the language...
:)

Originally Posted by Less of Lena:
But you know what's so sad? Even with a billion words at their disposal, many American teens (and adults, too) still can't find a substitutes for the words "like" and the f-word ("It's, like, so f'in cold outside"), or the increasingly ever-present "y'know".

But if they keep saying y'know, soon we'll have 1 Billion and 1 words in the English language. Pretty soon we'll have more than anyone can know because people just keep making them up and Webster keeps going with the flow.

Originally Posted by almostheaven:
But if they keep saying y'know, soon we'll have 1 Billion and 1 words in the English language. Pretty soon we'll have more than anyone can know because people just keep making them up and Webster keeps going with the flow.

That is so true. Its like i am sure google is now a word. Not only a noun (for the website) but also a verb (just google it). So bizarre how in our language thinks stick and become apart of our everyday language. And you're right Webster just keeps adding them to the dictionary.

not to mention all those words that sound the same but are spelt different or are spelt weird and sound "normal" i.e-draught

I love those words...lol its like a challenge to remember which means what. Or is it wich or witch? hmmm

Originally Posted by da fat n da furious:
I love those words...lol its like a challenge to remember which means what. Or is it wich or witch? hmmm

haha ladies here are some more homonyms:
too, two, to
hear, here
there, their
your you're

Or, being a border girl here...how two words can be spelled different in English, but in different countries...such as 'color' in the US and 'colour' in Canada. I get so used to seeing it the Canadian way, I just don't even think about it anymore. And I'm darn near living in a hoose instead of a house! :lol3: I DO love my Canadian friends... :hug:

Originally Posted by VelVeeta:
That is so true. Its like i am sure google is now a word. Not only a noun (for the website) but also a verb (just google it). So bizarre how in our language thinks stick and become apart of our everyday language. And you're right Webster just keeps adding them to the dictionary.

Main Entry: google1
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: to search for information about a specific person through the Google search engine
Example: She googled her high school boyfriends.
Etymology: trademark Google
Usage: googling n

Source: Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6)
Copyright © 2003-2005 Lexico Publishing Group, LLC


BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Originally Posted by fitgal2:
not to mention all those words that sound the same but are spelt different or are spelt weird and sound "normal" i.e-draught

Not to confuse the foreigners, but don't you find it weird that I before E except after C...and except in the word WEIRD??? :D

My hubby has a problem with lose/loose. I keep telling him to LOSE an O. He still doesn't get it.

Originally Posted by almostheaven:
Not to confuse the foreigners, but don't you find it weird that I before E except after C...and except in the word WEIRD??? :D

I never got that word correct until someone who frequently got aggravated over its misspelling pointed out that weird is spelled weird. Now I never miss it. :lol:

I also have to agree that words are added rather willy-nilly. Seriously, ten years from now is anyone going to have a use for 'metrosexual'?

Of course, my personal favorite is still antidisestablishmentarianism, which one of my high school English teachers referred to as the longest word in the English language. It's not, but it's still pretty cool.

Here is a pretty good article on both the concept of what a word is and a person's vocabulary.

I'm always interested in expanding my vocabulary, but I seem to already have a fairly good one, if the quizzes in Reader's Digest are any indication. ;) I still recalled my surprise when I discovered that 'machiavellian' is not in the vocabulary of most high schoolers. :lol3: I suppose that says something of the sort of person I befriended as a teenager, eh?

I hope they (whoever is in charge of such things) weed out words as they fall into disuse. Perhaps they can have a Word Hall of Fame for goofy words that were once all the rage but eventually fell out of favor.

I also wonder what they're going to do with all the "leet speak" words that really don't have any verbal counterparts.

At the rate the language is evolving, I'll bet we hit 2 billion soon! I just hope good grammar doesn't go extinct in the process!

Originally Posted by :
I just hope good grammar doesn't go extinct in the process!

I fear that it already has. :mad: Grammar and its twin sister, proper spelling, are on their last legs. Seriously, how often have you seen a product in the store proudly proclaiming 20% LESS CALORIES THAN BEFORE? (It should be "fewer" calories, for those scratching their heads.)

I am constantly correcting my husband's grammar (we have an agreement that I can do that if I leave his spelling alone). It's frustrating as a parent, because I am trying to teach my daughters proper grammar. I love my mother-in-law, but she came very close to a painful demise when she constantly used the term "feets" to my eldest a couple of years ago. :tantrum: :hot: :censored: Feets!

Originally Posted by Less of Lena:
I just hope good grammar doesn't go extinct in the process!

Umm I think it already has...High school kids are starting to use MSN slang in their papers :dizzy:

Originally Posted by GreatBigMonsterMomma:
I fear that it already has. :mad: Grammar and its twin sister, proper spelling, are on their last legs.

My daughter never could spell worth a lick. It was the subject she had the most difficulty with. We tried Hooked on Phonics, tutors, the whole works.

So when she had dinner with me yesterday and used the last of the pickles, I asked her to write it on my grocery list. After she left, I rewrote it and crossed out PICKELS.

Originally Posted by :
I also wonder what they're going to do with all the "leet speak" words that really don't have any verbal counterparts.

I must be terminally unhip, I have no idea what that means.

Originally Posted by :
I am constantly correcting my husband's grammar (we have an agreement that I can do that if I leave his spelling alone).

I'm allowed, nay, encouraged, to correct my fella's grammar. If he says something that he knows isn't quite right he waits for me to tell him how to say it before going on. :dizzy:

I, for one, find the addition of words to the English language very interesting. I've been learning Spanish and it seems so cumbersome at times. Most concepts or "things" that have come about in the last hundred years either use a Latinized (did I just make that up?:p ) version of the English word or a description of what the thing is (e.g. telefono for telephone, absorbente interno for tampon).

Regarding "leet speak"...

Originally Posted by JuliaTN:
I must be terminally unhip, I have no idea what that means.

I'm referring to the shorthand many folks (mostly teens, I think) use online. Some examples: "wre r u" instead of "where are you", or "ne1 no how 2 ski?" as opposed to "Does anyone know how to ski?".

I'm also referring to substituting numbers for letters, as in gr8 ("great").

There are also all the online acronyms... lol, rofl, asl, and so on.

I think the keyboarding language is probably evolving even faster than the spoken language is!

I wouldn't mind so much if people knew proper grammar and spelling and made a deliberate decision to break the rules, for whatever reason. What worries me is the nagging feeling that fewer and fewer people know what rules they are breaking.

Paragraphs? Punctuation? Capitalization? Spelling? There are rules about those things?

Many of the posts I see on message boards these days worry me as much for their presentation as for their content!

I really feel sorry for folks who are trying to learn English, especially those who frequent message boards ((waves to Pavellina))! English is complicated enough as it is without adding in all the slang variations!

My husband has a really good grasp on grammar, but he's terrible with spelling. He can't get the long/short vowel sounds figured out. Our running joke is "huge...with a D!" When we first met online, he used to type hudge all the time. He still has a problem taking the extra T out of "writting".

Some people think leaving out punctuation in posting is ok. But if I find a post too difficult to understand with too many run-on sentences, I'll tell the poster. Some posts give me a headache to try and read and I'll give up on them. And if I'm giving up, others probably are as well. So they're not going to get the responses they might have hoped for.

I upset my husband last week because I refused to read one of his blog posts. It was long enough I'd need to scroll down, but there weren't any paragraphs, or so much as a space between sentences, to say nothing of the spelling. It may well have been profound, but I just could not do it. He is coming up on getting out of the Navy this summer so he is looking for a civilian job and unfortunately discovering that being unable to spell 'submarine' is not a good thing for a submariner! This is to put it mildly.

When I was in school, not really that long ago, my English teachers commonly deducted points for misspellings. Not all do, sadly. My cousins went to the same high school my husband did, and not a one of them can spell either.