I’m loving it. I have been seriously loosing big time on the ‘+’-issue, I have to admit that I kinda pulled it out of my .. as it came in handy. Good job!

@everyone:

Go ahead, write whatever u like! The author of this reply (smileys) @ it & will try 2 bite his tongue, well, fingers off b4 making further comments regarding the ‘(hearts)’ issue here.

I think the whole subject went a bit too far, from hearts to bowie knives, cossaks and the x-files. I think I’ve made my point relatively clear and feel better now

Today, the letter X is a signifier for the unknown. We have the TV show called The X-Files, which was steeped in credulity but basically ran off an enthusiasm for the unseen. “X-factor” is another way of saying “wild card”, and so forth. Wilhelm Roentgen named the mysterious radiation coming out of his tubes “X” rays to indicate that he had no real idea what the radiation was.

Roentgen’s sense of the letter X came from algebra, where it was the symbol for an unknown quantity, then as now. In the early days of mathematics, people didn’t have modern symbols to play with; instead, they worked with diagrams and “word problems”. Before it became abstracted and modernized, right up through the 1850s, algebra was all about finding the unknown quantity, what we today would call “solving for X“. Not having the modern conventional symbols, mathematicians of the Renaissance described algebra as “seeking the unknown thing”.

In Italian, the language of mathematical pioneers like Tartaglia, “thing” is cosa, and the Italian mathematicians’ word for themselves comes into English as “Cossists — thing-people! Almost Cossacks. . . .

Hey, (hearts), Wikipedia says plus is a Latin word meaning “more”. The word is much older than the symbol, which wasn’t used until the late 15th Century. The + sign is a simplification of “et”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus

Do you have some justification for the statement that the word “plus” is the name of the symbol and not a word in itself?

>Anyway, why not use the word that was intentionally replaced by the heart symbol in the first place? If you don’t have a heart symbol at hand, why not say “love” or “loves”?

I can only guess at Phil’s motivation, but my guess is that he was trying for the cutesy gimmick. It’s sort of like word-play, making puns and the like. Similarly, as you say, the heart symbol represents the word “love” - it was just such a word-play game. Graphically present the word with a symbol we associate with the word. So the natural next step in the word-play game is to replace the word for the symbol into the statement, rather than the word that the symbol represented. Basically, he did it because it’s funny*.

Also, for someone who has such an obsession over correcting this “misuse”, it seems rather ironic that you choose as your identifier the “incorrect” use. Shouldn’t you call yourself “(heart)”, to emphasize the “correct” form?

*YMMV. Funny is subjective. Hi, Mom!

SFwriter Said:
>… there is a display talking about the “evolution” of the Bowie Knife…which is clearly the product of Intelligent Design (albeit by Man, not some diety)

Amusing observation, but not particularly a valid criticism. The word “evolve” in a generic sense means develop or improve over time. It got applied to the biological case as the appropriate word to describe the observation that life forms don’t look static, but rather change over time. Cast in light of the 19th Century mindset, “develop or improve over time” seemed a fairly appropriate description. Modern biological Evolution doesn’t convey the same sense of “getting better”, but it does carry the concept of development or change over time. However, the words “evolve” and “evolution” are not strictly limited to the biological theory use. In a practical sense, the design of a knife did evolve, through human innovation and design. That is applicable to just about any tool. The difference is that the tools aren’t reproducing themselves.

So, yes, I have heard of the OED, seen it, read bits and pieces, I even remember looking words up in the OED when surfing the more explicit sites on the internet at younger age - but not anymore. I’m no knight in shiny armor, on a mission to defend the english language, not suffering some kind of conservative notion to protect the innermost beauty of this form of verbal and written communication.

The standard set by the OED and the people working on it is however only a guideline and you might have noticed, that in 99.9% of all cases, the standard adapts to the language spoken in the real world rather than the other way round. So, in other words, the Oxford English standard is merely a snapshot of what the language was like at some stage, brushed up and polished to look like what some people want the language to be - and like some scientific theories it leaves us with a framework that we can agree and build on, but it’s something that describes reality, it does not represent reality. Nobody sane in his or her mind does speak Oxford English (sorry, all you posh, english gentlemen).

Now, to finaliz(s)e all this, I am only complaining about the translation of written english into a symbolic language and vice versa. If you have to do it, do it propertly. If you’re thinking of a headline like “Science mag loves me too” and you feel that since you’re posting it on the web, you have to remove the word “love” and use a symbol instead for whatever reasons, then use a damned symbol, or, instead, write the proper english|french|german name of that symbol - in brackets, if you have to. Write (heart)|(cÅ“ur)|(herz)! Don’t use non-existent words or make up new words!

But maybe I am too late - maybe the verb-form of “heart” has become reality already, has already found its way up, has already become a part of everyday english - maybe I missed it. Maybe I’m just overreacting as I am afraid that the (non OED-conform) word “hearts” is being used on purpose to avoid the usage of the word “love” - in the same way as the “black sheep” song isn’t PC anymore in britain and they’re now singing about “rainbow sheep”.

Big up! What about “misunderestimate”, I liked that one, by the way. Really.

As to some Ultimate Authority over English, surely you’re familiar with the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary (and attendant professional lexicographers) that do indeed set the standard for English all over the world. The BBC won’t even SAY a word on the newscast that isn’t extant and existent in the OED!

And I agree completely about meanings evolving… I mean take the word Chauvinist for example… What a tremendous change that has gone through! Originally it was coined by opponents of Nicholas Chauvin (a French Soldier under Napolean) as a name for people that shared his mindless patriotism. Now look at its accepted meaning: Someone who has misogenistic tendencies (hates women). In fact, it is practically synonymous with misoginist, thereby depriving English of a perfectly good word that once described fanatical devotion to a cause.

Sometimes we lose GOOD words in the struggle; sometimes we acquire stupid ones (”ain’t” and “irregardless” come to mind).

And yes, the languages have seen other examples of symbols being used as words in a language, lets just think of one that we all know from school: Addition - represented by the symbol (+) in mathematics became something so common, that we now tend to say things like “One plus one equals two”. But the word “plus” refers to the symbol, we have not seen anybody changing it to a verb-form [I have to admit, that a.) this is the first example that popped up in my head, and b.) I didn’t spend much time looking for examples proofing the opposite, oh and c.) I have no idea what the verb-form of “plus” would look like - plusses? pluses? pluss?]

Anyway, why not use the word that was intentionally replaced by the heart symbol in the first place? If you don’t have a heart symbol at hand, why not say “love” or “loves”? Is it bad? Uncool? Too emotional for a rational scienctist? Is it because the definition of love does not withstand the strict expectations of the scientific community? I don’t understand! Somebody please explain!

Thanks for the great discussion - I enjoy making use of the english language this way and even more I enjoy defending it - even though it seems as if it’s a lost battle!

– Again: since english isn’t my first language, all spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are subject to copyright –

Sorry, had to do it…
Congratulations on the acknowledgement and notoriety, Phil! Nah only kidding about the notoriety, since it is only ill-fame from the point-of-view of the jealous ones that you so frequently debunk…

Hey (hearts) & Blake: Despite the fact that I speak some French, Latin, Punjabi (Hindi/Urdu), and a tiny bit of Fijiian, Cantonese, Japanese, Greek, Macedonian, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, et al, and even a smattering of Klingon, there is no better, more precise and expressive language than English. I’m just grateful that I grew up with it rather than having to LEARN it. English is not a language of “rules” so much as it is a language of “exceptions” (’i’ before ‘e’ EXCEPT after ‘c’, or whenever the word is “weird”). Don’t be too hard on this (literal) bastard child of French and German (Normans & Gauls, if you prefer), for that is what gave us the rich tapestry, along with the willingness to borrow freely from all other languages.

Why, if it wasn’t for the Icelandic people, we wouldn’t have the unique word “window” (finestra, fenster, fenêtre or some variation in most languages).

Let English grow! Dont’ let it become pedantic, dull, boring, common, pedestrian, ordinary, regular, everyday, banal, jejune, unremarkable and paralysed under a weight of rules for the sake of rules. As long as the extrapolation is progressive and builds upon previous growth, let it be.

For the record, I hate NE=any, gr8=great, ur for “your” or “you are”, and anything that is directly attributable to sheer laziness. © by the Department of Redundancy Department