Over the past few years, I have become very disenchanted with the way we in the UK are killing our own spoken language. When I was at school, many years ago, we were taught how to pronounce words and string them together to make a meaningful sentence. Over the years, I used these simple rules and seemed to get along fine with most of the population speaking in the same manner. However, about twenty years ago there seems to have been a breakdown in teaching that has produced the appalling use of language we are now being subjected to.
Top of my hit list is the use of the word 'Absolutely'. I asked my sister-in-law what she thought it meant and she explained to me as though I were a child that it was another word for 'Yes'. "So why not just say yes" I queried. "I don't know" was the answer. To clarify, 'Absolutely' does not and never has had any connection with an affirmative statement. It is an adverb and means 'in an absolute manner, esp completely or perfectly''. My fellow Brits have corrupted it and now it even appears in dictionaries as an alternative to 'Yes'. Why not just say yes?
That's it for this post but expect more to come.
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