MCJ Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 17:08 I used to think the kids who called me “Martin the Martian” were idiots, but given Martin’s provenance from the Roman god of war, Mars, and that god’s association with the blood-red planet, I guess it was an etymologically perfectly valid association.
Not that they knew that. Jerks.
MCJ Posted on Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 23:00 A hot topic of discussion in the Jones household these past few weeks – we’re crazily exciting – has been the subtle slide of (young) English speakers to using nouns as adjectives.
I had said something was “a bit crap”, and my dad retorted that, if at all, it was “a bit crappy”. I try and be correct in my language usage – or, at to be more precise, to only break the rules deliberately – so this misstep made ponder about where this had come from. We couldn’t think of too many examples: I’ve heard people refer to things as “pretty shit”, or “kind of poo”, and, notably, the ABC’s The Hungry Beast has a segment highlighting things they think are “a little bit bullshit.”
So, when did we start corrupting “crappy” and “shitty” to just “crap” and “shit”? And is it something confined to defecations-related words?
