Gaming slang pisses off Anglophone

[Stark]

That was in a thread about rocket engineering. These terms are so commonly used, everyone who doesn't know them shouldn't be in that conversation anyways. (Or look up not only them, but also a shitload of other background info.)


"Blops" on the other hand... I have never heard of that as an abbreviation of Black Ops and I consider myself a gamer. (I was initially thinking about the files you need to safe before jailbreaking or updating your iOS device, so that you can downgrade later.)

This is fucking hilarious. It's okay to require research for stuff... sometimes?

[DPDarkPrimus]

If you don't know a term someone is using, you can always ask them what it means.

Not that big of a deal.

[weemadando]

That was in a thread about rocket engineering. These terms are so commonly used, everyone who doesn't know them shouldn't be in that conversation anyways. (Or look up not only them, but also a shitload of other background info.)


"Blops" on the other hand... I have never heard of that as an abbreviation of Black Ops and I consider myself a gamer. (I was initially thinking about the files you need to safe before jailbreaking or updating your iOS device, so that you can downgrade later.)

This is fucking hilarious. It's okay to require research for stuff... sometimes?

I was reading a thread and someone was using MATHS to support their argument.

Because I'm a dummy dumb I can't figure out what MATHS is.

So we need to ban MATHS from being used.

[Artemas]

lol so blops is bad but iOS is perfectly understandable you plebian technophobe

[General Zod]

If you don't know a term someone is using, you can always ask them what it means.

Not that big of a deal.

Unless you're asking about national holidays. Then it's serious business.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Amusingly, the longer a game title, the more interesting the acronyms get. e.g. Bayonetta would never be abbreviated as just B or BAY with any expectation of the recieving party understang to what you're referring (Unless you're on a bayonetta board) but you say something silly like Assbro or blops or blands and everyone knows precisely what you're talking about. I've always thought that was teh funneh.

I'm pretty sure it's abbrevated as T&A though that makes one wonder just which over hyped graphically exploitational female game it is this time.

[Akkleptos]

Given the fact that a common language across Spain, France and Italy facilitates communication, you would describe this development as a degeneration. Do you really think you can justify that?

That's just idiotic.

I, myself, am a native Spanish speaker. The thing is that degeneration led to the creation of multiple Romance languages, which could sometimes be understood by a speaker of another so-generated language (take French and Spanish, Italian and French, and so on)...

While they all spoke Latin, it was alright. But they on took to speaking different languages, similar in grammar and vocabulary, yet different enought to be troublesome for people of different areas to understand one another:

An example:
English: butter
French: beurre
Italian: burro
Spanish: mantequilla

Imagine you walked into a grocer's shop anywhere in Europe asked this: "Ich veux one kilo mantequilla"...
Which would be the most puzzling word for, say, a French, German or English shopkeeper?

[Duckie]

Given the fact that a common language across Spain, France and Italy facilitates communication, you would describe this development as a degeneration. Do you really think you can justify that?

That's just idiotic.

I, myself, am a native Spanish speaker. The thing is that degeneration led to the creation of multiple Romance languages, which could sometimes be understood by a speaker of another so-generated language (take French and Spanish, Italian and French, and so on)...

While they all spoke Latin, it was alright. But they on took to speaking different languages, similar in grammar and vocabulary, yet different enought to be troublesome for people of different areas to understand one another:

An example:
English: butter
French: beurre
Italian: burro
Spanish: mantequilla

Imagine you walked into a grocer's shop anywhere in Europe asked this: "Ich veux one kilo mantequilla"...
Which would be the most puzzling word for, say, a French, German or English shopkeeper?

Good, good. Now define the exact difference between a language and a dialect (Valencia and Catalonia are probably very interested, and also doing this will make you the most famous linguist of your era, so hop to it so I can incorporate your paper into my work).

It turns out that all dialects and colloquialisms, even things like "Ain't" or "Gonna", help communication, just with a certain subset. Just as saying "ba'a" (this is a reasonable and well-understood pronunciation in a large portion of the united kingdom and united states) will cause confusion to those expecting something like "Butt. Terr.", it helps for those who are most familiar with that pronunciation who will find the latterly pronounced one strange and unusual to their ears.

As these regional pronunciations and grammatical variations grow more pronounced, you get a distinct dialect and eventually language (most people divide languages when they are not mutually comprehensible, but that's like saying Species split when their sub-breeds can't interbreed anymore- a great concept, but flawed in execution due to the vagueness of "can speak to eachother"- are Scots and Malaysian English different languages? Would they be if they were the only ways of pronouncing English due to some hereto unforseen disaster hitting everywhere else?).

Speaking in walloon french helps the walloons understand eachother, even though the Parisians don't get it. Speaking in southern dialects of romance eventually caused Occitans to no longer be understood by French speakers. Was that a problem? Not to them. Certainly to the French if they wanted to understand, but if a Frenchman wants to understand Occitans in their native area, he should learn Occitan (or conquer and wipe out their language with centuries of minority language restrictive policies and social pressures, as historical). Eventually, these regional changes and pressures give rise to the difference between Tibetan and Chinese, or English and Marathi.

You just have to drop the idea of degeneration: it isn't any dialect speaker's duty to communicate with anyone other than people in their dialect, because they speak their dialect and not others'. If this isn't true, then we have to ask why White Mid-Western English is the American Standard and Blacks are WRONG WRONG WRONG, and not the other way around**. To take it to its logical extreme, we should describe English as a "Degenerate Regional Form of Prakrit, the lower class dialects of Sanskrit*", which is retarded. Pretty soon I hope you'll understand why 'degenerate' is no longer scientific linguistic terminology, which was only recently accepted as true as early back as the 19th century.

*Not technically true, Sanskrit is just an older aunt of English's, but a tangent into what exactly the ancient ukranian horse nomads of 10,000 years ago who were the ancestors of all europeans, north indians, and fairskinned uyghurs (tocharians) spoke would be distracting.

**Again, the standard being the one that's most useful to learn and the standard being inherently correct and all changes from it being degeneration are two very, very different ideas. The latter requires you learn Chaucer's, or Shakespeare's English to learn 'proper' English if we take your concept of degeneration seriously. The former just says that it's most useful to learn the most widespread way of speaking, and that slang and dialect is useful mostly for fitting in and understanding native speakers.

[Akkleptos]

Good, good. Now define the exact difference between a language and a dialect (Valencia and Catalonia are probably very interested, and also doing this will make you the most famous linguist of your era, so hop to it so I can incorporate your paper into my work).

Ah, the regionalism card. The thing is nobody cares which variant of Spanish they speak in regions of Spain the size of a tomato ranch in Sinaloa (except them, and they're pretty neurotic about it). Oh, and scholars.

And the development of the different Romance languages DID get in the way of proper understanding between peoples of different regions. It's just that it was a different world, where most people would live all their lives and die within 10 miles of the place they were born, meaning post-Roman Europe was a Petri dish for little local variations to become differentiated languages.

But, yes; the fact that a Mexican, an Italian and a Frenchman cannot all speak amongst themselves in Latin IS an obstacle to communication.

Why do you think they invented Esperanto? (Of course it didn't take, but the idea is quite evident: one universal language>dozens of local languages).

It turns out that all dialects and colloquialisms, even things like "Ain't" or "Gonna", help communication, just with a certain subset.

My point, exactly. JUST with a CERTAIN subset. The rest of the people will be confused by the differences. No, really... Don't you think there is an actual reason why the New England Journal of Medicine is written all in formal English?

Speaking in southern dialects of romance eventually caused Occitans to no longer be understood by French speakers. Was that a problem? Not to them. Certainly to the French if they wanted to understand

According to your reasoning, any given group of people may start distorting the language they speak, till it eventually becomes uninintelligible to the rest of the speakers of the language, and fucked be the lot of them. You miss the point that it would be utterly impractical as it would be unnecessary.

Picture this: You show me your dog.
I: "Aww, what a nice cat!"
You:"Cat? But this is a DOG!"
I: "Yeah, well, where I come from, we call them cats."
You would surely be in your right to think "Wow, are these people retarded!". And distortions like this example do happen quite often, as I'm sure you are aware. Standardisation is important, you see.

A line has to be drawn to determine what IS valid in a language, and what is not. Otherwise, we might as well all hop on a merry streetcar down Anarchy Lane. And whether an addition or adaptation of a word, or a grammar structure provides a distinct advantage to communication or somehow impairs it seems to me like the best criterion.

For example, in English, it was supposedly bad to end questions with prepositions. But that's the way people speak, and even write, and everyone understands each other, probably even better.

"With whom are you going to the cinema?" and "Who are you going to the cinema with?" work pretty much the same way.

But "Fo' shizzle"? I'm not even sure what that means. See, here's one left out by this change. Me. And I'm quite sure many other non-native or non-US English speakers would be on the same situation.

[Ryan Thunder]

This is fucking hilarious. It's okay to require research for stuff... sometimes?

Yeah, the less serious it is the less research should be required. Therefore, no research should be required for discussions involving games.

Maybe we can put in a word filter that replaces "blops" with "Call of Duty: Black Ops".

[Akhlut]

My point, exactly. JUST with a CERTAIN subset. The rest of the people will be confused by the differences. No, really... Don't you think there is an actual reason why the New England Journal of Medicine is written all in formal English?

Only a certain subset of people will be able to actually read the NEJM, though, as I don't think most people who speak English can readily deduce things like "anoxia results from CO inhalation, as it binds more strongly to hemoglobin than to oxygen."

So, in that case, is the jargon they use an impediment to understanding and communication?

According to your reasoning, any given group of people may start distorting the language they speak, till it eventually becomes uninintelligible to the rest of the speakers of the language, and fucked be the lot of them. You miss the point that it would be utterly impractical as it would be unnecessary.

Picture this: You show me your dog.
I: "Aww, what a nice cat!"
You:"Cat? But this is a DOG!"
I: "Yeah, well, where I come from, we call them cats."
You would surely be in your right to think "Wow, are these people retarded!". And distortions like this example do happen quite often, as I'm sure you are aware. Standardisation is important, you see.

That's not how language evolution works, though. It occurs through grammar changes, pronunciation changes, and other, similar wholesale changes, not through ridiculous cyphers.

A line has to be drawn to determine what IS valid in a language, and what is not. Otherwise, we might as well all hop on a merry streetcar down Anarchy Lane. And whether an addition or adaptation of a word, or a grammar structure provides a distinct advantage to communication or somehow impairs it seems to me like the best criterion.

And, how, praytell, do you propose to enforce such standardization? The French have their own language acadamy that tries to enforce such linguistic purity and guess what: it's fucking useless.

Also, language has pretty much always been Anarchy Lane, yet we can still communicate and interact with people. If you want to speak with people badly enough or consume their media, you will learn their language, simple as that.

For example, in English, it was supposedly bad to end questions with prepositions. But that's the way people speak, and even write, and everyone understands each other, probably even better.
<snip>
But "Fo' shizzle"? I'm not even sure what that means. See, here's one left out by this change. Me. And I'm quite sure many other non-native or non-US English speakers would be on the same situation.

Why is a contraction with an unusual suffix any more difficult to comprehend than needless grammar shifts, aside from penetration (more people are aware of and use sentences that end in prepositions than use fo'shizzle)? It's not like there's a moral imperative at stake, and the only barrier to understanding langauge is how widespread a certain portion of it is. Exsanguination is a perfectly good English word, but if you started using it, you'd confuse a hell of a lot more people than you would with fo'shizzle; should exsanguination, then, be eliminated from English?

[Akkleptos]

Only a certain subset of people will be able to actually read the NEJM, though, as I don't think most people who speak English can readily deduce things like "anoxia results from CO inhalation, as it binds more strongly to hemoglobin than to oxygen."

Okay, bad example. Take instead Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Times, The Encyclopædia Britannica, or any decent magazine aimed at decently cultivated people.

Why "cultivated people", you may ask? Because a cultivated person is closer to a 100% (unattainable, and difficult to define) or self realisation in regards to culture, as a general understanding of the world surrounding the person. Here, a trailer park hick (with pardon of trailer park dwellers everywhere) or a black person from the inner city -on average- will qualify as less than 50%. Or would you suggest to "lower" the language requirements for such publications? "Fo' shizzle!".

That's not how language evolution works, though. It occurs through grammar changes, pronunciation changes, and other, similar wholesale changes, not through ridiculous cyphers.

Actually, it DOES work in this way, as well as many others.

For example, in México, we sarted calling those plants (and their fruit) elsewhere called "bananas", "plátanos" (which is a similar plant that bears no fruit)... Pretty much like calling "dogs" "cats".
In Spanish, the word "murciégalo" that was already accepted as the somewhat standardised form in the Castilian language, eventually evolved into "murciélago", through transliteration, because enough people weren't able to pronounce it properly.

And there are many other mechanisms in which a language changes, or rather, in which words and grammar change, as I'm sure you are aware.

And, how, praytell, do you propose to enforce such standardization? The French have their own language acadamy that tries to enforce such linguistic purity and guess what: it's fucking useless.

Newspeak for everyone!!!

No, seriously, I don't know about French, but in Spanish we have the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (which of course has representatives from all the Spanish-speaking countries and regions) and its subordinate regional Academies. And guess what? They work. Whenever you're in doubt as to how you should say or spell a certain word, or regarding a grammar or punctuation rule, you refer to the Academy, via its dictionary, or grammar manuals, etc.

If your standard for such an Academy to work is to impose a fascist-style rule over the way everybody speaks or writes, that's just silly. It rules pretty much only on formal Spanish.

Why is a contraction with an unusual suffix any more difficult to comprehend than needless grammar shifts, aside from penetration (more people are aware of and use sentences that end in prepositions than use fo'shizzle)?

Now you're just being silly... heh heh. Everyone understands either of the examples with the prepositional shift, but the people who understand "fo'shizzle" outside the US (or even within) cannot be regarded as any kind of majority. Duh!

[Winston Blake]

My point, exactly. JUST with a CERTAIN subset. The rest of the people will be confused by the differences. No, really... Don't you think there is an actual reason why the New England Journal of Medicine is written all in formal English?

Only a certain subset of people will be able to actually read the NEJM, though, as I don't think most people who speak English can readily deduce things like "anoxia results from CO inhalation, as it binds more strongly to hemoglobin than to oxygen."

So, in that case, is the jargon they use an impediment to understanding and communication?

Obviously it's not. However, if one major journal of medicine decided to use one set of anatomy terms, and a second major journal decided to use a different set, for no good reason, how can that possibly be interpreted as a good thing? One can simply say 'Oh they can communicate clearly within each subset, so there's no problem'. But that's a red herring.

Really, the problem is that there are now two subsets where there once was one. This indisputably results in a decrease in overall interoperability (for actually working together) and compatibility (in the content itself), even if both characteristics remain the same or even increase within each subset. Duckie and Akhlut have articulately tried to push the idea that if linguistic 'interoperability' (for lack of a better word) stays constant or increases when one examines all subsets individually, then it's wrong to say 'there has been a decrease in interoperability'. I'm not going to use the word 'synergy', but overall, there actually has been such a decrease, or 'degeneration'.

In this sense, the development of the Romance languages from Latin really was a 'degeneration'. It's a loaded term - it has connotations of 'everything becoming bad/worse/terrible/decaying'. This emotionally conflicts with the obvious facts that:
- the number of speakers of Romance languages has vastly grown.
- all the non-Latin components have grown to become complete and mature.
- the non-Roman culture of the societies has become rich and mature.

This does not change the fact that the technical characteristic of interoperability has decreased. Interoperability matters - it's a key factor in ease of communication of any sort, e.g. programming languages, technical jargon, handling weights/measures/currency. Since the main use of languages is to communicate, for it to become more difficult is generally a bad thing.

However, I can accept that forcing people to all speak the same dialect or language would cause conflicts and complicatons within the existing subsets, and thus decrease ease of communication. So what's the solution? Well, why not consider the idea that, ideally, the structure of world language would have the smallest practical number of the largest practical subsets?

By 'practical' I mean that whatever results in the highest ease of communication should be used. This means that the use of dialects for local use is fine, if learned with a standard form, for whenever state-level communication is required (e.g. the Philippines). But it also means that standardisation does matter; it just isn't optimal to use 100% standardisation. So people should not be apathetic or encouraging toward the splitting off of new subsets for no good reason. (And it actually would be a good thing to have an international auxiliary language).

(On a vague personal note, to me that sort of attitude stinks of the pervasive idea nowadays that 'diversity = good, therefore more diversity is always better' and 'too much centralisation is bad, therefore reducing centralisation is always better').

Wherever standardisation threatens the existence of certain dialects or languages, then naturally they should be preserved for the sake of history. This would ideally include maintaining a community of living speakers and a corpus of literature.

[Duckie]

Interestingly, my girlfriend, who actually uses the NEJM, says it's actually a terrible example of 'proper' or 'standard' english- it's heavily sprinkled with latin technical terms incomprehensible to the average person. If one learned NEJM-style speech when learning English, you'd rapidly have to learn to speak the colloquial local dialect or face the fact that your archaic syntactic stylisms and neolatinate technical medical vocabulary don't foster much communication except with other scientists trained to read and write in that dialect.

In the same way, a speaker of a dialect so variant (such as Highland Scots, and not AAVE- besides occasional unusual unique vocabulary words, which are present in all unique dialects, there's nothing incomprehensible about AAVE unless racism closes your ears) that they can't communicate with people from the standard dialect, learns the standard dialect to talk to people. There's nothing incomprehensible or amazing about this- people who speak in thick scots can invariably speak normal, if accented northern british dialects. People who speak in AAVE who have to interact with non-black-urban persons an also speak in a standard southern dialect (there is functionally nothing that separates a black accent and a southern american one, save the colour of the speaker). Cockneys and Aristocrats alike can still communicate, just less naturally and casually (yes, casually. an aristocrat still speaks in a natural, casual way for himself- just a subculture composed of his own collegues rather than the vulgus. It's just that usually aristocratic speech is set to be the standard, so what's casual for aristocrats is learned for other people).

If two dialects get so divergent that they stop being the same language, the two of them will learn one or the other or some intermediate form for communication. If they don't, they obviously have no need to communicate anyhow or they'd already have plenty of intermediates- if all the English Speakers died out besides the Malays and the Scots, and the two of their languages drifted apart until they had no way to communicate, would they care? Why would you care, if the speakers don't see an imperative to preserve it, or learn Intermalay or Interscots or some intermediate standard form, or pick a neutral third language? Any moral imperative of 'all people must be able to communicate with eachother' is ridiculous, because people aren't limited to one language, let alone the retardedness of the idea that people could possibly be limited to speaking one dialect of one language.

NEJM/Scientific Publication dialect, by the way, is no more specialised of a dialect than black speech, valley girl, kentish, or london aristocrat. Each are used in certain social contexts by certain types of people among their fellows, and more general forms are used for cross-group communication (but bearing the indelible marks of the native idiolect). Each has certain grammatical features- reliance on the passive in NEJM, copula drop in black speech, etc. And of course everyone has multiple social contexts they operate in. Labov showed in the 60s, and nobody has ever disputed, that there are innumerable sociolects and registers that are swapped into and out of in everyday use. If you've ever spoken with human beings you've done it without even knowing it.

The fact that certain dialects (various varieties of london aristocrat, midwestern pre-chainshift broadcaster american, etc) are considered 'proper' is that they are what society has chosen to use for generic speech among educated, socially desireable people of the appropriate colour and a wholesome economic background. There's nothing inherently correct about these, and if the universe instantly realigned itself and edited all our memories to think that Valley Girl Californian or Northumbrian was the most correct social variety of English, there's no inherent "laziness" or "lack of grammar" or "confusion" this would cause among speakers who started to use it as their generic register when not speaking as a member of a subculture.

It's amazing how in language, many people confuse 'standard' or 'this is traditionally what we regard as usual' with 'morally upright' or 'the best possible' or 'required'. It's probably that poor education and a linguistic ethnocentrism (the same sort that leads everyone to conclude they have no accent and speak normal english, and everyone else has weird dialects) cause people to think there's a reason speaking like a rich white dude is better, instead of the fact that we idolise rich 1950s midwestern white dude/rich 1950s london white dude speech because our society considers them the best exemplary members and wants people to be like them.

EDIT- By the way, why do black people speak like black people, and fishermen from martha's vinyard like martha's vinyard fishermen, and cockneys like cockneys? Cockneys especially know how 'proper' london speakers speak. They're right next door. So how come they get it 'wrong'? Probably because they don't give a shit how 1930s-1950s british white dudes with money speak. They try to speak like their community leaders, consciously and unconsciously, and that's what drives slow divergence of dialects, whether local or sociological or cultural. They don't do it to have a 'secret code', but it is a way to reinforce your feeling of group identity. (Labov (1963) has empirically measured that local accents get stronger on Martha's Vinyard when tourists are around compared to in private, not because they're maliciously trying to speak corruptedly to confuse your virgin standard english ears, but because they're unconsciously distinguishing their ingroup from outgroup. He also did a great one where middle class dialects of salespeople in new york suddenly shoot up to be hypercorrected rich, standard english if a customer speaks a richer sounding dialect (to summarise the results roughly).).

[Lagmonster]

That was in a thread about rocket engineering. These terms are so commonly used, everyone who doesn't know them shouldn't be in that conversation anyways. (Or look up not only them, but also a shitload of other background info.)

"Blops" on the other hand... I have never heard of that as an abbreviation of Black Ops and I consider myself a gamer. (I was initially thinking about the files you need to safe before jailbreaking or updating your iOS device, so that you can downgrade later.)

This is fucking hilarious. It's okay to require research for stuff... sometimes?

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. Do you actually have a rebuttal to this statement, or are you just going to lather smarm all over the thread? Because I'm seeing less thought in this post than whatever it is that passes for the AI of a spambot.

Yeah, the less serious it is the less research should be required. Therefore, no research should be required for discussions involving games.

Maybe we can put in a word filter that replaces "blops" with "Call of Duty: Black Ops".

"Blops" is gaming slang. Technical acronyms and abbreviations are - well I'll be damned, they're technical acronyms and abbreviations! I pity you the constant pain you must be in from whatever blow to the head caused you to fail to see why one of these things is listed and explained in accessible industry journals or marketing materials, whereas the other exists inside the heads of a bunch of kids - and makes its way to the world by way of YouTube clips and blog posts that a lot of consumers wouldn't go near even if they and the author had superficially similar interests.

Although your idea about a filter seems appropriate. For example, I could make one that searches for posts you make and replaces the contents with randomly selected clippings from articles in a scientific journal. That way, at least once in a while something with your name attached to it would be fucking useful.

[Akhlut]

Only a certain subset of people will be able to actually read the NEJM, though, as I don't think most people who speak English can readily deduce things like "anoxia results from CO inhalation, as it binds more strongly to hemoglobin than to oxygen."

Okay, bad example. Take instead Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Times, The Encyclopædia Britannica, or any decent magazine aimed at decently cultivated people.

What does being "cultivated" entail?

Why "cultivated people", you may ask? Because a cultivated person is closer to a 100% (unattainable, and difficult to define) or self realisation in regards to culture, as a general understanding of the world surrounding the person. Here, a trailer park hick (with pardon of trailer park dwellers everywhere) or a black person from the inner city -on average- will qualify as less than 50%. Or would you suggest to "lower" the language requirements for such publications? "Fo' shizzle!".

Why is black, inner-city culture not as good as the culture of old and rich white guys? I'm going to say that Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Afrika Bambaataa are all far more culturally erudite and self-realized then what is, essentially, old pop music. What of their gospel music, which carries the soulful heartbreak of a people enslaved and dehumanized, yet yearning to overcome and be free? Why is their dialect not sufficient for being treated as the basic dialect? And it's not like they're completely ignorant apes; many of them are just as aware of the world as you or I, especially with increasing penetration of the internet.

That's not how language evolution works, though. It occurs through grammar changes, pronunciation changes, and other, similar wholesale changes, not through ridiculous cyphers.

Actually, it DOES work in this way, as well as many others.

For example, in México, we sarted calling those plants (and their fruit) elsewhere called "bananas", "plátanos" (which is a similar plant that bears no fruit)... Pretty much like calling "dogs" "cats".

No, that would be more akin to calling a dog a fox. It's sensical and is more of an example of semantic drift or using a familiar word to describe an unfamiliar thing or concept. It's not shifting a word describing something familiar to something else familiar.

In Spanish, the word "murciégalo" that was already accepted as the somewhat standardised form in the Castilian language, eventually evolved into "murciélago", through transliteration, because enough people weren't able to pronounce it properly.

That's mispronunciation/linguistic drift, not calling one noun a completely different noun. It is not calling a dog a cat, however.

And, how, praytell, do you propose to enforce such standardization? The French have their own language acadamy that tries to enforce such linguistic purity and guess what: it's fucking useless.

No, seriously, I don't know about French, but in Spanish we have the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (which of course has representatives from all the Spanish-speaking countries and regions) and its subordinate regional Academies. And guess what? They work. Whenever you're in doubt as to how you should say or spell a certain word, or regarding a grammar or punctuation rule, you refer to the Academy, via its dictionary, or grammar manuals, etc.

If your standard for such an Academy to work is to impose a fascist-style rule over the way everybody speaks or writes, that's just silly. It rules pretty much only on formal Spanish.[/quote]

So, then, what is the official position on the usage of vosotros, given that it is only used in the Iberian peninsula, whereas in central and South America, it has been abandoned? What of the strong Native American influences from Nahuatl, Mayan, Runa Simi, or the dozens of other languages? The Academy might regulate spelling and grammar to some extent, but I can guarantee that the Academy's recommendations are subordinate to what the people actually speak.

Why is a contraction with an unusual suffix any more difficult to comprehend than needless grammar shifts, aside from penetration (more people are aware of and use sentences that end in prepositions than use fo'shizzle)?

Now you're just being silly... heh heh. Everyone understands either of the examples with the prepositional shift, but the people who understand "fo'shizzle" outside the US (or even within) cannot be regarded as any kind of majority. Duh!

So, why is it harder to actually understand? It's simply relatively rare as a word, but, then again, so are "exsanguination," "conflagration," "ken," or "revenant."

[Maj]

So, why is it harder to actually understand? It's simply relatively rare as a word, but, then again, so are "exsanguination," "conflagration," "ken," or "revenant."

Because fo'shizzle is far more ephemeral and far less practical. There needs to be some measure of stability and pragmatism in a language because it leads to standardization. And while I abhor the idea of an authority deciding what can and cannot be considered "English," I really do appreciate being able to go to a dictionary and look things up.

Blops will pass away relatively quickly. Google (the verb) will not.

[Akhlut]

So, why is it harder to actually understand? It's simply relatively rare as a word, but, then again, so are "exsanguination," "conflagration," "ken," or "revenant."

Because fo'shizzle is far more ephemeral and far less practical. There needs to be some measure of stability and pragmatism in a language because it leads to standardization. And while I abhor the idea of an authority deciding what can and cannot be considered "English," I really do appreciate being able to go to a dictionary and look things up.

Blops will pass away relatively quickly. Google (the verb) will not.

While it might be more ephemeral (possibly, it's been around for the better part of a decade and seems to be entering the pop-culture register), how is it less practical then any of those archaic words? It's an informal affirmative, and thus is likely to actually be used (similar to ain't, which has been around for the better part of 300 years), while exsanguination has been almost entirely replaced with "bled out," conflagration with simply "fire" or "blaze," ken with "know" or "knowledge," and revenant with "ghost" or "poltergeist."

[Maj]

While it might be more ephemeral (possibly, it's been around for the better part of a decade and seems to be entering the pop-culture register), how is it less practical then any of those archaic words? It's an informal affirmative, and thus is likely to actually be used (similar to ain't, which has been around for the better part of 300 years), while exsanguination has been almost entirely replaced with "bled out," conflagration with simply "fire" or "blaze," ken with "know" or "knowledge," and revenant with "ghost" or "poltergeist."

Running with your examples, "OK" will still continue to dominate the informal affirmative.

As to your examples, while they are largely archaic, most of them still serve practical purposes. I have never heard exsanguination in reference to someone bleeding out, but I have heard it in reference to someone whose blood was taken out. I don't hear conflagration in reference to a building burning down, but I do hear it in reference to really, really big fires - both in the literal and figurative sense. And revenant I don't think I've ever heard in the sense of a ghost - I know it in the sense of something long thought dead coming back, be it a vampire in fiction or an idea in reality (if anything, specter - in the sense of something that haunts - is a more common replacement for revenant).

[Akkleptos]

Okay, my examples are not good enough. Close, but not quite good enough, for the reasons Akhlut kindly pointed out.

Nevertheless, the subjacent reasoning still stands.

Why is black, inner-city culture not as good as the culture of old and rich white guys? I'm going to say that Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Afrika Bambaataa are all far more culturally erudite and self-realized then what is, essentially, old pop music. What of their gospel music, which carries the soulful heartbreak of a people enslaved and dehumanized, yet yearning to overcome and be free? Why is their dialect not sufficient for being treated as the basic dialect? And it's not like they're completely ignorant apes; many of them are just as aware of the world as you or I, especially with increasing penetration of the internet.

Oh, my!!! You, Americans and your Black vs. White... That's totally irrelevant. A language's primary purpose is communication (and I type this in as I listen to great renditions of classic blues by the master, Jimi Hendrix)...

Get this: if it promotes general confusion, it IS degeneration (okay, it might help communication within a certain group of people, but if it somewhat impairs understanding by speakers of the same language outside said group, then its usability turns negative, thus earning the grade of DEGENERATION). If it helps understanding (take for instance the newly coined Mexican term "escanear" for "scan", which cannot be usefully translated into Spanish), then it's valid, and contributes something for which the original language had no equivalent. THAT, right there, is EVOLUTION (linguistically speaking, of course).

So, then, what is the official position on the usage of vosotros, given that it is only used in the Iberian peninsula, whereas in central and South America, it has been abandoned? What of the strong Native American influences from Nahuatl, Mayan, Runa Simi, or the dozens of other languages? The Academy might regulate spelling and grammar to some extent, but I can guarantee that the Academy's recommendations are subordinate to what the people actually speak.

The Academy takes such things into account, via the local Academies. Thus we have the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas
And the people, as you say, may speak pretty much any way they like. But whenever they want their speech consigned in writ, for whatever serious purposes, they will have they vernacular converted to formal Spanish, which is essentially the same everywhere, save for a handful of words.

So, why is it harder to actually understand? It's simply relatively rare as a word, but, then again, so are "exsanguination," "conflagration," "ken," or "revenant."

Now, you're just being silly again. Most of the words you're saying are either archaisms or technical words. Now, technical words, especially regarding medicine, are practically the same in any modern Western language, and thus can be easily understood by native speakers of a variety of languages, provided they have had a minimum of Greco-Latin roots education (as is the case with most Medicine, Biology, etc... students). "Conflagración" is often used in everyday journalistic language in Spanish. "Revenant" is still used in French, as far as I know. This is the basis of the complex network that gives words validity across several different languages.

Which is not the case with "fo'shizzle".