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Glenn said:
You're everso close to the basic Latin construction with this:
Regarding the order of conjoined subjects or objects, my schooling took it even further. I was taught that you must but second person first, third person next, and first person last (of course, omitting any that are not relevant to the context).
So, according to my teachers it should be:
You, Chris, Leslie, and I are going to regret this evening.
You, Chris, Leslie, and I, to regret this evening, are.
The prosecutor is going light on you, Pat, Lee, and me.
The prosecutor, on you, Pat, Lee, and me is going
How are you, Alex, the dog, and I going to fit in this sewer?
erm . . . in aqueductus, Alex, canus et ego commudua est (??????!)
The orangutan and I clearly need to keep an eye on you, Jo, and the horse.
Ah a challenge. Simia large et ego, you Jo, havere ocula ecce (!)
Very similar to Master Yoda on Starwars?
The reasons I was given were all along the lines of "propriety," rather than grammar. But we were still graded on getting it right. In my adult life, I always took this word order as being a suggestion, rather than a rule. Some sentences make "propriety" seem like a pretty small matter.
And, although this might be formally correct, nobody actually talks like this, anyway!
My objection to abandoning anatomical eponyms is that a proper name is the same in any language, whereas the substitution is Anglophone arrogance. I suspect this may have started with the death of King George VI from Buerger's disease. At the time, this was associated in the popular mind with smoking, as almost all cases were smokers. Suddenly, the corporate media changed from eponym to symptom with thromboangiitis obliterans - possibly under orders from the Tobacco Institute whose members spent considerable money on advertising in those media. The symptomatics are also much longer and frequently unpronounceable on quick reading - part of what a friend of mine called the "witchdoctor syndrome" - that which has no or even negative medical effect, but enhances the status of the doctor in a given situation.
Dog breeds: A feral dog (whatever breed) and coyote cross is called a coydog and they are a major problem to livestock.
Texas has largely escaped the turnpike term because of the extensive use of tollway or toll road. It is interesting that Dallas is somewhat encircled by the LBJ freeway and the more recent President George Bush Tollway.
hippogriff said
My objection to abandoning anatomical eponyms is that a proper name is the same in any language, whereas the substitution is Anglophone arrogance.
"Arrogance" is a motive, not an act; it's arrogant only if you do it for arrogant reasons. There may be good reasons. And even if it's arrogance, the arrogance is Anglophonic only if you replace the eponym with an English term, that is, a term that uses English roots. If you use Latin or Greek roots, it's much more likely to be internationally recognizable.
No? You think Latin isn't nearly so international a language nowadays as, say...English? Maybe a term that uses English roots isn't so arrogant after all.
However, I really joined this thread not to be quarrelsome but to look at "murmuration". I enjoy all those terms—a pod of whales, a mob of joeys, a warren of rabbits and so on—but like ltw246, I think a lot of them were just invented a few centuries ago. My own mental image is of British literati in the late 1700s suddenly having a fad of making up fun new names for odd creatures—an exultation of larks, a crash of rhinocerates, a murder of crows. Then the fad died away, only to be rediscovered in the 20th century, when it was noised abroad that the proper term for a group of sparrows is a "quarrel".
An article at http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/collectives.htm leads me to believe I'm not far off, except it was three centuries earlier than my guess.
a list of the correct terms to describe groups of various types of animals:
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml
The collective names at the link above are interesting and can be fun to think about, but for the most part they are fanciful -- and quite arbitrary -- rather than "correct." I would be very surprised to find that a group of peacocks was ever referred to as an "ostentation" in any scientific or technical literature.
Tom
I have never come across 'ostentation of peacocks' before today. But guess what, the very first page from Google books gives 2 books, in 2006 and 2011, that have direct uses of it-- use mind you, not reference for discussions!
Now that I have looked up and down at it a bit, it actually sounds kind of good, not so exotic anymore-- the internalizing process is kicking in.
Now I'll go work on 'an implausibility of gnus.'
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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