My English Is Going South, Part Tee-You
My language may be gradually slipping south, but Microsoft is impeding my learning. Just the other day, I dashed off an email to a co-worker suggesting that we might should ask so-and-so about such-and-such. Outlook put a squiggly line under”we might should,” recommending “perhaps we ought to” instead.
Perhaps we friggin’ ought to.
March 2nd, 2008 at 7:00 am
Son, you chose to immigrate to the Confederate States of America, so you can damned well learn the language! :)
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:54 am
Be careful that you don’t go too native.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Hmm, I would have said emigrate. Maybe that’s a Yank thing, too.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
The difference between immigrate and emigrate is coming vs. going.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:40 am
There is evidence that double modals (e.g. “might should”) originated in the British Isles, especially in Scotland:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1283(199324)68%3A4%3C430%3AEFBSOD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1
http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/corpus/search/document.php?documentid=594
There’s really nothing wrong with double modals. English was never a top-down language. Most of the hard-and-fast rules of grammar that we know today were imposed in the 1800’s by snobs wanting to Latinize English, which is an impossible task (but some of their rules took, so we are forever chastised for split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences, despite centuries of common usage for both).
March 6th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
the proper phraseology is “might could” . Jeez.