Aaaargh!

[maxsims]

Joe,

From "The Ten Most Annoying etc..."

Nonnative English speakers....?

[Joe Carillo]

Joe,

From "The Ten Most Annoying etc..."

Nonnative English speakers....?

Yes, the term "nonnative English speakers" does throw off not a few people, but it's a perfectly legitimate term that has gained currency in recent years, particularly in English as Second Language (ESL) teaching. It simply means people who speak English as a second or third language.
 
Just to give you an idea of how current the term is, there were 11,000 entries in Google for "nonnative English speakers" as of midnight just now. I'm rather comfortable using the term because I ran an English-language services company for almost five years until 2005, serving a largely institutional clientele in South Korea.
 
As to the absence of the usual hyphen between "non" and "native," it can also be unsettling but this is the way American English spells the term these days. For one, Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary spells it without the hyphen.

I'm sure you are not hitting me personally for using--and condoning--the word "nonnative" and that you mean well in your aversion to that word from a linguistics standpoint.

[maxsims]

My Funk & Wagnalls (admittedly a 1983 version) gives it no currency at all.

The trouble for us nonindians and nonaboriginals is that "nonnative", besides being a particularly ugly neologism, has a construction that leads us to place the emphasis on the first syllable, thereby further obscuring the word's meaning.   Which, one would think, is why the hyphen was invented in the first place.

As the wise man once said, "If it ain't broke, etc."

[Joe Carillo]

My Funk & Wagnalls (admittedly a 1983 version) gives it no currency at all.

The trouble for us nonindians and nonaboriginals is that "nonnative", besides being a particularly ugly neologism, has a construction that leads us to place the emphasis on the first syllable, thereby further obscuring the word's meaning.   Which, one would think, is why the hyphen was invented in the first place.

As the wise man once said, "If it ain't broke, etc."

I can appreciate your discomfort--I hope it's not outright outrage--over some of the explosive changes that the English lexicon has undergone in recent years. In my case, though, not being a prescriptivist at heart, I can still sleep soundly despite them.

Max, if I may make a friendly suggestion, though: Perhaps it's time to retire your Funk and Wagnall's and use a more recent edition of any of the leading dictionaries today--if the largely descriptivist and American English-standard Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate doesn't suit you fine. I'm sure an up-to-date dictionary will give you a higher level of comfort with the hundreds of new words bursting off in the English lexicon--"noob," for instance, which the Global Language Monitor is so stridently bandying around as the 1,000,000th word in the English language. (Let's see if it gets admitted into the more respectable dictionaries, though--and if so, how soon.)

[maxsims]

Your suggestion is reasonable, but accepting the slow but insidious de-robing (note hyphen) of the English language is not on my agenda.

I can accept the reasoning behind the elimination of many hyphens - words like childish and preselection spring to mind - where attaching the prefix or suffix directly to the root word creates a perfectly logical (and eminently pronounceable) word.

But, when we teach our kids how to say  hoop, loop, stoop, troop and coop, and then hit them with a mongrel such as cooperative, can we blame them for being a tad confused?

English is far from a phonetic language:  why make it even less so?

[Joe Carillo]

Your suggestion is reasonable, but accepting the slow but insidious de-robing (note hyphen) of the English language is not on my agenda.

I can accept the reasoning behind the elimination of many hyphens - words like childish and preselection spring to mind - where attaching the prefix or suffix directly to the root word creates a perfectly logical (and eminently pronounceable) word.

But, when we teach our kids how to say  hoop, loop, stoop, troop and coop, and then hit them with a mongrel such as cooperative, can we blame them for being a tad confused?

English is far from a phonetic language:  why make it even less so?

Yes, indeed, why take out the hyphen from traditionally hyphenated words? About six years ago, I was surprised by this development myself. The newspapers and magazines were then dropping those hyphens like dead flies. Were they misguided in doing so? To find out, I checked my digital Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary and this was what I found out: of the 2,495 "non-" words it listed, I would estimate nothing less than 85 percent of the entries spelled without a hyphen--from "nonaffiliated" to "nonadditive" to "nonaromatic" all the way to "nonzero." Gone even is the usual hyphen between the "non" and a word that starts with a vowel!

Why? The only answer I can think up is that it's the sign of the times. Sic transit gloria mundi! Or, more appropriately, sic transit gloria verbum!

[maxsims]

"...and Far from the Madding Gerund was their well-meaning but, alas, too-hurried attempt to transport their language mayhem from web to print so non-netizens and laypeople can share in the merriment."

You know what I'm about to ask, don't you....?

1.   What the heck is a non-netizen?

2.   Why is it not spelt nonnetizen....?

 

[Joe Carillo]

"...and Far from the Madding Gerund was their well-meaning but, alas, too-hurried attempt to transport their language mayhem from web to print so non-netizens and laypeople can share in the merriment."

You know what I'm about to ask, don't you....?

1.   What the heck is a non-netizen?

2.   Why is it not spelt nonnetizen....?

 

“Netizen” is new English coinage for “an active participant in the online community of the Internet.” According to Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, the new word made it to the English language in 1994. That landmark year was, of course, when the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure.

As to why I spelled “non-netizen” with a hyphen, it’s because “netizen” is such a strange new word that it just might confound people even more if I prefixed it with “non” and didn’t supply the hyphen. With a hyphen, I think there’s a greater chance that people would see the parallel between “netizen” and the much more common word “citizen,” which, of course, was obviously the model for the creation of the new word. There would also be little danger that people might think that I’m foisting a nonsensical, nonexistent English word on them. In a few years, I’ll probably be comfortable enough to spell the negative form of the word as “nonnetizen” in the same way that I have become comfortable with older “non”-words spelled without the hyphen.

[maxsims]

Hi, Joe....
 
Just read the commendations for your new book.   
 
Hmmm....One of them included:
 
"...On top of everything, he is up-to-date on current thinking about grammar, ably highlighting the distinction between formal and informal style and deftly tackling the issue of sexist language.”
 
Surely he meant to write up to date.....?

Or is this another one of those signs of the times?  (Next thing we know, it will be signs-of-the-times!)

[fimbriae]

Joe,

From "The Ten Most Annoying etc..."

Nonnative English speakers....?

Why would you fuss over that?

[hill roberts]

And what about, "It's hotting up out here..." this is another Aaaaargh for me....BBC started it and it makes me, well, aaaargh!!!!

[maxsims]

Just got my copy of "Give Your English the Winning Edge".

Aaaargh!   Chapters 80-85 inclusive are printed upside down and back to front!

Are there no proofreaders in this country?

[Joe Carillo]

Aaaargh! You must have gotten a spoiled copy from a bad printing batch! It's most likely a binding problem, though, rather than a proofreading one. All of my copies of GYEWE are perfectly OK for pages 80-85, and I'm positive that the others that passed my hands since the first printing in July 2009 were OK, too.

But a quality problem like this is really unpardonable, maxsims, so I'd like to apologize profusely for it. Could you possibly send the bad copy and your complaint to the address below and ask for a replacement?

Ms. Corazon Gonzales
Production Department
The Manila Times
371 A. Bonifacio Drive
Port Area, Manila 1018

I'm calling them by phone right after this to ask them to replace that bad copy immediately. Again, I'm very sorry that this had to happen to you of all people! If you can give me your address, I'll also send you a perfect copy with my compliments.

[maxsims]

Don't fret about it, Joe.   I can live with it.   After all, I spent a goodly amount of years reading leaded typeface upside down on the stone.    But you may want to take a second look at the second par of the Preface.

[Joe Carillo]

OK, I won't fret since you can live with the flaw. As to second paragraph of the book's preface, I must have already taken a thousand and one look at it since the first printing and I think it's as good as I can make it--unless, of course, you can pinpoint anything that can stand improvement.