Grammar Police "anymore"

Hawk Teflon

Hawk Teflon

Veteran
Growing up, my parents did their best toward making sure I didn't sound uneducated. It was annoying back then, but now I've found myself going crazy by small things. Words like:

especially pronounced "exspecially"
kept pronounced "kep"
across pronounced "acrossed"

...and so on. Now, however, I've been hearing a word thrown into a sentence that makes me want to slap some people. But I hear from a lot of people, so I don't know if I'M the one that's wrong. It's the word "anymore." I have always use it with a negative.

"I don't drink anymore."
"I can't run anymore."

But people here are saying it instead of "now" or "from now on."

"We need to carry these boxes to the other closet anymore."
"I used to eat cereal, but I eat eggs anymore."

It's driving me up a freaking wall. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll correct my dialect. Otherwise, I will be informing others of the correct form. I've googled it, and I've found nothing. Please help. I can't take it ... anymore.
 
Couldn't resist...

Couldn't resist...

grammar_nazi.jpg





grammar-nazi.jpg
 
Grammar Nazism and Godwin's Law, all in one thread...

...the usage you're complaining about has made it into Merriam-Webster. Which is kind of sad, but languages evolve, and sometimes they evolve into platypuses.
 
The one I don't understand is "axe" me a question. I mean, I understand when you have a non-native English speaker whose original tongue has different letter pronunciations, like Asians difficulty with their l's an r's. But where did "axe" come from?
 
Sad Max said:
Poor pronunciation. Stereotypically urban ghetto-type poor pronunciation.
Click to expand...

But there has to be more to it than that!...Also, people who say 'idear'. That goes beyond just an accent into adding letters that don't exist. I'm guessing it's just a regional thing. People hear someone say it that way, so they say it that way, and it gets passed on like a virus. 'Axe' just gets me because there is no way you can read the word phonetically and come up with that pronunciation.
 
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Sad Max said:
Grammar Nazism and Godwin's Law, all in one thread...

...the usage you're complaining about has made it into Merriam-Webster. Which is kind of sad, but languages evolve, and sometimes they evolve into platypuses.
Click to expand...

Wait, so anymore can be in the positive? This is the worst day of my life.
 
Well, I found my answer regarding the 'axe' thing, and it was far more interesting than I thought--

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19991216

While the pronunciation /aks/ for ask is not considered standard, it is a very common regional pronunciation with a long history. The Old English verb áscian underwent a normal linguistic process called metathesis sometime in the 14th century. Metathesis is what occurs when two sounds or syllables switch places in a word. This happens all the time in spoken language (think nuclear pronounced as /nukular/ and asterisk pronounced as /asteriks/).

Metathesis is usually a slip of the tongue, but (as in the cases of /asteriks/ and /nukular/) it can become a variant of the original word. This alternative version in Old English was axian or acsian, as in Chaucer's: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housband to the Samaritan?" (Wife's Prologue 1386). Ascian and axian co-existed and evolved separately in various regions of England. The ascian version gives us the modern standard English ask, but the axian variant ax can still be found in England's Midland and Southern dialects.

In American English, the /aks/ pronunciation was originally dominant in New England. The popularity of this pronunciation faded in the North early in the 19th century as it became more common in the South. Today the pronunciation is perceived in the US as either Southern or African-American. Both of these perceptions underestimate the popularity of the form.

/aks/ is still found frequently in the South, and is a characteristic of some speech communities as far North as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Iowa. It is one of the shared characteristics between African-American English and Southern dialects of American English. The wide distribution of speakers from these two groups accounts for the presence of the /aks/ pronunciation in Northern urban communities.

So in fact, your colleague is correct in calling /aks/ a regional pronunciation, one with a distribution that covers nearly half of the territory in the United States and England.
 
Dictionaries don't establish correct usage; they just track common usage. So no matter how apparently wrong or stupid a given connotation or pronunciation for a word might be, if enough people use it it will eventually be included as a standard. Which is a pity; it means that the worse people get at using a language, the worse the quality of the basic guidebook for using that language becomes.
 
These are correct
"I don't drink anymore."
"I can't run anymore."
Click to expand...

These are wrong
"We need to carry these boxes to the other closet anymore."
"I used to eat cereal, but I eat eggs anymore."
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, text language is beginning to find it's way into forums and the internet, also.

I actually overheard a girl, on the bus the other day, speaking in text-talk, I really have no idea how the person at the other end of the phone could understand a word she was saying.
 
iSTy said:
These are correct


These are wrong


Unfortunately, text language is beginning to find it's way into forums and the internet, also.

I actually overheard a girl, on the bus the other day, speaking in text-talk, I really have no idea how the person at the other end of the phone could understand a word she was saying.
Click to expand...

When the dictionary itself includes these despicable constructions, what recourse is there, to say they're wrong?

A time-traveler from the 1600s could complain that "you are" is incorrect gutter language, and that only "thou art" is proper English, but he wouldn't get much traction...
 
A time-traveler from the 1600s could complain that "you are" is incorrect gutter language, and that only "thou art" is proper English, but he wouldn't get much traction...
Click to expand...

Unless he was Hugh Jackman.
 
Hawk Teflon said:
"We need to carry these boxes to the other closet anymore."
"I used to eat cereal, but I eat eggs anymore."
Click to expand...

please tell me this is some kind of sick joke. because if this is the future of our our language, i might as well just end it all now... :badputer:
 
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