Are we losing our language - Chemists vs Pharmacies ?

We eat lunch at lunch time, tea at tea time and dinner at dinner time!
Oh! We sometimes had breakfast and elevenses as well.

It always was Sunday lunchwhen I was a child; think it depends where you lived. And no, not a class thing!

And when did Christmas dinner and Sunday dinner become Christmas lunch and Sunday lunch?

OK let's keep it clean......my pet hates mostly have to do with rail travel:
train station =we used to manage perfectly well calling it the station
station stop = again, station was fine, or possibly stop on its own
this train will terminate = no, the service might, but one hopes the train is good for a few more journeys
we will shortly be arriving into London Euston - = no you arrive IN , you COME INTO (or GO)
customers = when did we stop being passengers?

Who writes this garbage that "train managers" (?) have to spout? On the few occasion that you hear someone speaking NORMALLY like a real human being, it is so refreshing.

A previous work colleague caused consternation in W.H.Smith by asking for Durex, which was the name for Sellotape in New Zealand.

Chemists study chemistry and pharmacists study pharmacy! Massive difference!

Yes I like language to be 'alive/changing' read "Bugbear of Literacy".by Ananda K. Coomarswamy Written word is in concrete but when only the spoken word was used we would be the living libraries (elders).

We have Fourex beer (written as XXXX) here in Queensland, but XXXX is a brand of French condom. You just can't get ways from those Frenchies, can you!

Especially as the pre-war generation called condoms French letters, which caused me some hilarious misunderstandings when i was a little 11 year old learning French, and exchanging letters with a French penfriend. We were set up with these penfriends, had to keep up the correspondence, and then answer questions in a spoken exam.

You can imagine my family's laughs when I was searching for my French letters because I had a French oral the next day. (The never explained the joke - I was years and years before I dared use the adjective 'French'.)

Whilst teaching reading in primary school with American children in the class I was careful to avoid the word 'rubber' for an 'eraser'

In evening class our French teacher told us of her embarassment on an exchange .She said that when baking her mother put preservatives in her baking. Shock!horror!when she learnt that 'preservatif'is the French word for contraceptive.
That knowledge came in useful when serving French customers in the Pharmacy

And when did railway station become train station?

It's never ending, is it, the different American meanings for words?

Let's see:
US fanny means bum (we'll not discuss what fanny means in English, but I'm sure a lot of GIs got into bother ....)
US bum means tramp
US purse means handbag
US pocketbook means purse or wallet

and the list goes on, with gas v petrol. hood v bonnet, trunk v boot.

The one I hated when i was young was calling a young woman 'baby'. If any lad called me baby he got a mouthful of, well, not very babylike angry words. I still hear it as an insult.

But at least the whole thing means we have lots of different words for most things and ideas - many more than most other languages.

PennySue : better than him going into a hairdressers in the UK and asking for a sh*g...

My point about Asda was that when trading in UK do as UK does and call them biscuits. When I am in the states I know that they have different names for some things and I try to remember to use the local version.

As I told my Husband (who is a smoker) do not get off the plane and ask where you can have a fag!!!!

Spelling in US was simplified as english was not the first language of many of the settlers.

As I told my Husband (who is a smoker) do not get off the plane and ask where you can have a fag!!!!

My father who died only a few years ago carried on using the word "talkies" when he meant "the cinema"
which was odd as he was only two years old when Al Jolson first sang on screen

Oh gawd - poor man!!!

It reminds me of a different tale. A man went seafood fishing and got a flight home. He asked the stewardess to put the crabs he'd caught in the fridge. She obliged, but when they had landed he hadn't picked them up, so she put on the loudspeaker "Will the man who gave me the crabs please see me in the kitchen"

Can I just (belatedly ) add my penn'orth on the" names for a bathroom" topic. I met a charming lady some years ago who was English and had been an air stewardess with BOAC in the early days. She did transatlanitc flights, but as I said, was English. One day an American passenger on the plane asked for directions to the "restroom".Having no idea what he meant (but thinking perhaps he was tired) she said the plane didn't have one, but she could get him a pillow if he liked! Can you imagine the thoughts going through his mind???

I think wi-fi is a neologism invented by a false analogy with hi-fi which is 'high fidelity'.

A bit muddled here. What about wi-fi? Is that not wire free, therefore (a) wireless?
But my tranny isn't wi-fi, and my computer with wires is, or has.
I have no wires attached therefore am wi-fi? A wireless?
At least I can operate independantly without a power source, not counting tonights Chinese Duck, or yet the G&T

I never taught English "carelessly", nor, I suspect, did others writing here! Spelling, grammar and punctuation have to be accurate and fit the purpose to enable comprehension by the reader or hearer.

But yes, I love the fact that language is so dynamic; one of my specialisms when I studied linguistics was / is etymology (the only bit of linguistics I could bear, to be honest). Tracing the evolution of a word is fascinating!

I'm told by my GD that the latest 'in'word for something good is 'sick'!! 'Cool' is not cool any more!!

I teach English as a second language and can't keep up with the new words that are added to the lexicon daily. I love that words - and their usage change over time. My especial favourite is the word 'wicked' which is defined as both something bad and something good!

Yes we are losing our language. A lot of it is connected with the Internet. So many American expressions are now being used which jar on the ear as they make so little sense, 'going forward'. 'Going backward' I have neither seen nor heard tacked on to the end of a sentence. That is another manner of speech that is being lost, 'either or', 'neither nor'. The negative version is no longer used,'at this moment in time'. That is another Americanism that adds nothing but words, in spite of the fact that all text is now printed with only one space after a full stop to save keystrokes they say. Please don't ask who 'they' are. 'They' take good care that we never find out.

The teaching of English is now so carelessly undertaken in schools that affect and effect are used as if they are totally interchangeable, even in our newspapers. Advertisers use quite a range of spelling techniques to sell their products which leads to a lot of confusion among those who are not confident spellers. I was told in all seriousness by a teacher at my children's primary school forty years ago, "Oh we don't correct all the mistakes, we don't want to discourage them with all that red ink". So your child spells a word incorrectly, is not corrected, and continues confidently in the error. Thanks teacher. Those pupils are today's teachers.

Then we have those who hold the view that if the majority spell or use it that way then it must be the right way. I could scream when I hear 'different to' when 'different from' makes so much more sense. 'Similar to' is fine. Who in the world would say 'similar from'?

Just a few days ago I was corrected when I said, "You should have" and was told that it is now, "You should of", because that is what most people say. If they were taught to speak and write English as it used to be taught they would understand that 'of' is no part of any verb. What they are hearing is the abbreviation 'should've' and assuming, incorrectly, that the spelling is 'should of', when in truth it is 'should have' as in 'you should have listened more carefully. I was taught the reason for this. It was to do with past perfect or past imperfect tense of the verb, but that was a long time ago.

This lecture has gone on far too long, but English is a beautiful language used all over the world. It really is worth taking care of.

I remember being in a students dining room in Vienna in the mid 1960s when an American lass asked me where the bathroom was. "There isn't one" I said "But there's a toilet over there". I wasn't being sarky - I simply thought she wanted a place to wash.

Of course, i was being polite - at home in Yorkshire the toilet was the lav. Nowadays it's the loo - well, here in Australia anyway.

We can't escape Americanisms though - these days my unfavourite is 'listen up'. We used to just 'listen'.

And by whose definition can a toilet in a department store or airport possibly be a 'rest room'?

The American 'bathroom' for loo seems to be making headway - I saw loo rolls calling themselves bathroom tissue the other day.
If a bathroom is a loo, what do they call a bathroom (i.e. a room with a bath in it)?