SPFL Review

[Aim Here]

1 hour ago, DiegoDiego said:

You weren't taking about dialect though, you were on about English when I disagreed with you. Then you weasled your way out of it by shifting the goalposts.

Not at all. My whole point is that there is no such thing as a native speaker being wrong about the grammar of their own native language - and that the vast bulk of people 'correcting' English are either trying to inflict their own particular dialect (a language is a collection of dialects, after all) on someone else, or they're just inflicting arbitrary makey-uppy rules that no English language user even uses. *Everyone* is using at least one dialect, and most people switch between a few of them depending on who they're talking to.

> According to your viewpoint as I understand it, everyone in Scotland is at least bilingual and correcting them on their use of one of those languages is somehow "inflicting" upon them rather than helping them.

You understand wrong. My point is that there is no 'incorrect' English (or any other natural language) as spoken by a native speaker. English is just a big pile of mutually intelligible dialects and no one of them is 'correct' in any linguistic sense. It happens, in practice, that most of the time, when people are being 'corrected', what is happening is that the person correcting them is attempting to inflict a different dialect - usually Received Pronunciation, the English language's 'prestige dialect' - on a perfectly competent native speaker. There's no linguistic reason why RP is any better or worse than any other dialect (and most of the time you can boil down these language 'corrections' down to regional, class or occassionally even racial or gender prejudice). Sometimes these 'corrections' aren't even tied to a natural dialect - they're just completely bizarre and arbitrary rules ('less' doesn't apply to discrete quantities, you shouldn't split infinitives, and so on) whose only purpose is to aggrandize the person doing the correcting.

> At my work we often communicate with those who have learnt English as adults.

Righto. Non-native speakers are a different case entirely. For some biological reason, people aren't innately built to be experts in their second and subsequent languages, the way that native speakers invariably are. Non-native speakers can accidentally make utterances that no native speaker would think is meaningful or natural, so in that sense they can be incorrect. I've been careful to specify native speakers for that very reason.

> My boss has on occasion had to correct our grammar or word use

Written communication is a different beast, really, and language in some formal settings - academia and legal practice and so on - is sometimes standardized, or companies want their output to conform to a style guide of some sort. That certainly doesn't justify inflicting bogus so-called 'corrections' on language in informal settings, though.

 

Edited September 17, 2021 by Aim Here

[DiegoDiego]

The issue is that a different English is spoken in Peterhead from Penzance. Surely a "standard" variety is a good thing to aid communication? We don't live in village sized bubbles anymore.

Imagine the Arab world without MSA.

Of course, correcting someone you meet in a pub is arsehole behaviour, but you did use the word "ever" and there are quote clearly circumstances where its okay to correct someone on the language they are using.

[Aim Here]

1 minute ago, DiegoDiego said:

The issue is that a different English is spoken in Peterhead from Penzance. Surely a "standard" variety is a good thing to aid communication? We don't live in village sized bubbles anymore.

Imagine the Arab world without MSA.

Of course, correcting someone you meet in a pub is arsehole behaviour, but you did use the word "ever" and there are quote clearly circumstances where its okay to correct someone on the language they are using.

Using RP as a lingua franca so that people from Kingston can understand people from Singapore, or that people from Unst can understand people from Whalsay is fine, though that's just a case of practicality - there's no 'right' or 'wrong' dialect or language to use, though, so it's perfectly reasonable - if highly unlikely - that Singaporeans and Jamaicans converse in Doric or Swahili instead. The guys speaking received pronunciation had the guns and the money, so I guess they got first dibs on the prestige dialect of English.

It's a bit far from the actual issue of someone springing novel grammatical rules on a competent native speaker, though.

[Leith Green]

15 minutes ago, Aim Here said:

It's a bit far from the actual issue of someone springing novel grammatical rules on a competent native speaker, though.

Punctuation  and Grammar - Its the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit

Edited September 17, 2021 by Leith Green

[rowsdower]

I enjoyed my trip to Scotland a few summers back, the people there and have met some cool Scottish people traveling other places in Europe. My heritage is also from the Highlands (my last name is regularly found in Scotland, at least that's the impression I'm under), so those are the reasons to follow.
As a fan of a small-market baseball team, I thought following Celtic or Rangers would be akin to a Scottish person becoming a Yankees or Red Sox fan if they started following Major League Baseball. To me, it would be kind of a lame move to start following a foreign league and pick the richest team.

What shite baseball team do you support?

I look forward to the new logo that is the sole fruits of this endeavor. Maybe a podcast too.

[Monkey Tennis]

7 hours ago, Les Cabbage said:

Absolutely shocked to see a poster such as yourself getting furious over nothing

No fury.

Mere annoyance.

[Monkey Tennis]

4 hours ago, Aim Here said:

No. That less/fewer rule is not any kind of grammatical rule in English as any linguist understands it. Like the rule about splitting infinitives, it's an arbitrary construction imposed on language

Aren't all  such rules arbitrary constructions?

 

[Sortmeout]

Kilmarnock have been away less than 6 months and the clubs are saying they need a restructure?

I am shocked, absolutely shocked.

[Aim Here]

5 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Aren't all  such rules arbitrary constructions?

Sort of - the difference being that actual rules of grammar are the ones that naturally arise out of some sort of consensus of native speakers (and they don't need to be enforced because the actual speakers themselves can't help themselves but obey them), while the rule you're trying to enforce was concocted from a mixture of flimsy reasoning and thin air by some pompous eminent Victorian, and isn't a rule which describes the English language as it's used by competent native speakers.

 

[Monkey Tennis]

1 minute ago, Aim Here said:

Sort of - the difference being that actual rules of grammar are the ones that naturally arise out of some sort of consensus of native speakers (and they don't need to be enforced because the actual speakers themselves can't help themselves but obey them), while the rule you're trying to enforce was concocted from a mixture of flimsy reasoning and thin air by some pompous eminent Victorian, and isn't a rule which describes the English language as it's used by competent native speakers.

 

Hmmm.  The distinction you draw there is a bit feeble then.

In truth, I was being a bit of a dick, deserved calling out and was on the end, ironically I suppose, of quite the telt.

If the charge is that I was guilty of imposing my preferences, rather than correcting a genuine breach, then I'm happy enough to plead guilty.  It's pretty much what I do.

[Aim Here]

17 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Hmmm.  The distinction you draw there is a bit feeble then.

Not really. For the case you attempted to apply, one set of rules is the actual rules of the English language. The other isn't.

It's as if people are playing fitba' in the park and someone claims to be an authority and arbitrarily chimes in with 'That's not right, you have to spin around three times when you pass the halfway line'. They're clearly talking out of their arse. The real rules of fitba' are also arbitrary and could be completely different - but they DO happen to be the rules.

(The difference is, of course, that there IS an actual authority - FIDE - on what the rules of football actually are, whereas with language, it's all just a consensus among speakers, and linguists have to work out what the rules are by observing and interating with speakers).

Edited September 17, 2021 by Aim Here

[Alert Mongoose]

[Lex]

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Absolutely hilarious when you look at the 5 clubs pushing this!
Easily the 5 biggest underachievers in our sport are desperate for things to change... quelle surprise! After The OF, these 5 are probably the 5 next best supported clubs, which you would think would provide a base from which to achieve a degree of success.  But in reality the combined amount of debt and relegations between them over the past decade tells its own story.
These 5 perennial failures are right to organise a review. And it should be solely aimed at how not to run your club like a shitshow.
Yet another 'look over there' from their owners which their respective supports' will swallow up.  "It's someone else's fault we're shite!"
St Johnstone have won the same number of major trophies in the past decade as these 5 put together.  If you want to know how it's done, just pick up the phone, we're happy to help.  
Meanwhile, enjoy your review lads!!

Trying too hard.

[Loonytoons]

34 minutes ago, Lex said:

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

The Rangers

[Ranaldo Bairn]

36 minutes ago, Lex said:

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

Good question. I'm going to open a packet of Opal Fruits and think about that.

[AmericanFan]

13 hours ago, rowsdower said:

What shite baseball team do you support?

I look forward to the new logo that is the sole fruits of this endeavor. Maybe a podcast too.

Reference my avatar.

As to the rest, @johnnydun and @ropy and myself are making plans for a podcast that will be listened to by billions around the world.

[coprolite]

10 hours ago, Lex said:

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

Royal Mail to Consignia is close, but SPFL taking the English division names takes the prizes. Not only ditching the recognised brand but copying a competitor who used shit names is unprecedented surely. "Spfl championship" ffs. 

[Leith Green]

10 hours ago, Lex said:

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

Standard Life Aberdeen rebrand last year was a fuckin beezer.

The firm said its new name "Abrdn" would still be pronounced "Aberdeen", but that the rebrand would make it "modern" and "dynamic".

Maybe we need to rename -

Th Cnch Scttsh Prmrshp

In a fresh and exciting rebrand to attract instagrammers...............

[Willie adie]

10 hours ago, Lex said:

Has there been a worse rebranding in corporate history than SPL to SPFL?
Is there any other examples where it’s still being called the wrong thing around 10 years later?

Thing is which part is Professional, it's not the fucking administrator of the league