American Language
I have been thoroughly distracted from everything I should be doing by picking up a copy of Mencken's American Language (the 1919 edition) from the library. Being a parochial Brit I'd never heard of HL Mencken, unsurprisingly, and Wikipedia really doesn't speak well of him at all, but I'm loving the book. Taking everything factual with a hefty pinch of salt but all those cross-Atlantic snobberies and quarrels, all those beautiful (or sometimes hideously ugly) American words that I barely know and their derivations, and best of all, the words I've always assumed were classic British English but it turns out are modernish US inventions :-) Who would have guessed that "to donate" was considered such an abomination? It's also reintroduced me to "absquatulate", a word I was very fond of in my teens and have never heard once since.
I need to put the book down soon though because I have somewhere between fifteen and twenty guests turning up to play boardgames for three days at the weekend and that number of people eat a quite phenomenal amount of food. ("Quite" in British English usually means "a moderate amount of" but when it goes before an adjective of quantity like "phenomenal" it rather confusingly has the US (and older British English) meaning of "a tremendous amount". See how addictive this stuff is!)
Ed:actually that's an appallingly inaccurate definition of quite. What matters is the strength of the adverb/adjective. Quite with a strong term makes it stronger, quite with a moderate one reduces it. Quite big is smaller than big, quite enormous is bigger than enormous. Quite dead is deader than dead, which is an extreme state. Quite hungry isn't yet ravenous. Quite good is damming with faint praise, quite excellent is about as excitable as many reviewers get.
I need to put the book down soon though because I have somewhere between fifteen and twenty guests turning up to play boardgames for three days at the weekend and that number of people eat a quite phenomenal amount of food. ("Quite" in British English usually means "a moderate amount of" but when it goes before an adjective of quantity like "phenomenal" it rather confusingly has the US (and older British English) meaning of "a tremendous amount". See how addictive this stuff is!)
Ed:actually that's an appallingly inaccurate definition of quite. What matters is the strength of the adverb/adjective. Quite with a strong term makes it stronger, quite with a moderate one reduces it. Quite big is smaller than big, quite enormous is bigger than enormous. Quite dead is deader than dead, which is an extreme state. Quite hungry isn't yet ravenous. Quite good is damming with faint praise, quite excellent is about as excitable as many reviewers get.