Re: correct English usage
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 07:09, Pierre Frenkiel <pierre.frenkiel@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Kelly Clowers wrote:
>
>> They are not wrong per say, but only the first definition you mention
>> (anatomy) is in widespread use these days (which is why it said
>> "chiefly").
>
> Is that specific to American English, or is it also true for
> British English, Canadian English, ...?
> Paul's statement was much more stronger:
>
> this is the wrong word in English to describe the relation between
> Squeeze and Lenny. Maybe OK in some other European language, but not in
> English.
>
>> If you say "posterior" people's first thought will be "ass".
>
> but in the given sentence, posterior is clearly an adjective?
Yeah, but that will not change their first thought (at least it
didn't change mine, and I know my parts of speech, and pay
a fair amount of attention to language in general. Maybe I am
just weird, though).
>> That happens all the time with dictionary-based translations, by
>> the way. It can be very hard to tell if a definition is really used
>> much in practice.
>
> Then, for people whose native language is not English, in some cases
> the only way to find the right word seems to be try and error.
Likely. It is that same going from English to other languages AFAIK.
> Note that the WordReference English Thesaurus © 2012 gave the most common
> meaning for posterior in second place, and that it was nowhere mentioned
> that
> the time related meaning was deprecated. Is there a dictionary where this
> kind of information would be available?
I am not aware of one, though that doesn't mean it does not exist.
One might be able to use google search for that... searching
"posterior" does shows mostly dictionary sites and anatomy-related
things
>> In general there is a tendency in modern American English to
>> use rather simple words or descriptive phrases made of simple
>> words rather than a single very precise but less well known word.
>
> Again, is that specific to American English?
Good question, I am not sure if the British and others are
picking up this bad (IMO) habit.
Cheers,
Kelly Clowers
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