Linguistic ignorance at the beeb
So, Mark Liberman's posted about a new piece of hopeless reporting relating to language on the bbc website. Unfortunately, he either didn't take the quiz or missed a trick.
At one point they claim Mcfitty is an adjective. This seemed rather unlikely to me, though I'd never heard the term, as I knew of fitty as a noun and Mac- as a derivational morpheme that attaches to nouns to form nouns (eg. MacJobs), so I did a google:
(1) Nice work on the McFittie front!
(2) I bum Lee too harshley hes a lilk mcfittie!!!!
(3) [...]who refers to me as a "McFittie."
(4) Who I'd like to meet: A Pretty McFittie!
I won't go on -- this is blatantly a noun, you can insert for yourself the typical rant about lack of basic linguistic awareness amongst journalists, etc.
At one point they claim Mcfitty is an adjective. This seemed rather unlikely to me, though I'd never heard the term, as I knew of fitty as a noun and Mac- as a derivational morpheme that attaches to nouns to form nouns (eg. MacJobs), so I did a google:
(1) Nice work on the McFittie front!
(2) I bum Lee too harshley hes a lilk mcfittie!!!!
(3) [...]who refers to me as a "McFittie."
(4) Who I'd like to meet: A Pretty McFittie!
I won't go on -- this is blatantly a noun, you can insert for yourself the typical rant about lack of basic linguistic awareness amongst journalists, etc.