Bad, bad Bill.

[darcydodo]

I was just looking at the excerpt from Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words on Amazon, and I came across "admit to," which he says is incorrect. This did not seem right to me, so I went and looked in the OED. The OED says: "II.2.e. admit to (something): to acknowledge (a weakness, etc.); to confess to (doing or being something)." More to the point, that's the only case in which it admits that definition for "admit." (My usage here demonstrates what BB was presumably actually thinking of, but none of his examples was accurate for this case.)

If Bryson had his way and deleted those "to"s, we'd end up with Jesse Jackson allowing someone to father a child on a staffer, some other country raiding Angola with South Africa's permission, etc.

I repeat: Bad, bad Bill.

Comments

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

Still online, babe? You and your wacky times. & ;-)

[darcydodo]

Yeah, well. I should probably try going back to sleep. :)

So, how's the west coast with it's Pacific Time treating you, monanotlisa? :)

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

*g* Quite fine, thank you-- all wired after WriterCon, sad that it's over but looking forward to meeting you!

You know, I thought maybe I'm just on US time...but it turns out that my internal clock is simply yet permanently set on "nocturnal"...

[darcydodo]

I don't think you can really say "meeting you" when you've already met someone, unless you're using it in a sentence such as "I'll be meeting you at the bus stop," which obviously has an entirely different connotation. "Seeing you" would be more apt.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. These bus stops. Dodgy places, tsk-tsk!

[darcydodo]

Not that sort of connotation!

Though maybe that, too. ;)

[inkgeist.livejournal.com]

Or "I'll be meeting you at 6" right? Otherwise its 'meeting with' right? All of a sudden I'm paranoid about my english - just dont tell my students that. They'd have a FIELD DAY

[darcydodo]

Yeah, "meeting you at 6" works, too. "Meeting with" is, presumably, always for a meeting about something, rather than meeting up with someone.

Anyway, monanotlisa is German. You're practically American. ;) (Or did you end up getting your citizenship after all?)

[inkgeist.livejournal.com]

Ack, NO! I'm still a resident alien (explains a lot I know) and dont even get me started on the INS now known by a million different names. And while I have been here a while, I did live in both Richmond and East Oakland, both not known for their grammatically correct English - so I'm juss sayin'

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Welcome back. Do you still want to meet up sometime before I go back to the UK? I'm here until the 20th. :-)

I am also on weird time, since moving a couple of weeks ago to an office with no outside windows resulted in body clock randomness.

[darcydodo]

Do you still want to meet up sometime before I go back to the UK? I'm here until the 20th.

Sure thing. The 20th should give us a fair amount of time in which to play scheduling....

moving a couple of weeks ago to an office with no outside windows resulted in body clock randomness.

Ugh. Sorry to hear that. Both the screwed up circadian rhythms and the lack of windows! :) The annoyance of jet lag always makes me glad I'm not on some sort of rotating schedule.

[jsposito.livejournal.com]

Nice job of sleuthing. Now, is this a set of OEDs that your family owns, or did you access it at a library or online? If you've got the full shebang, that makes you the only other family I've met like that! :D Our OED takes up about six feet of shelving in the family room. When I was little, I used to look up swear words in it. Ha.

[darcydodo]

Ah, I wish we owned it. No, it's simple use of the Berkeley proxy server.

I rather like our corporeal dictionary (Webster's Third New International and Seven Language Dictionary), but it's not the OED.

[kwokj.livejournal.com]

I think one of my teachers had it in a four-pages-to-a-page edition. It came with it's own magnifying glass.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I have one of those. I got it secondhand, by which time the magnifying glass had gone walkies. It's in two volumes. (There's a third, containing emendations from the nineteen-thirty-something first edition to the nineteen-seventy-something second, which I don't have. I'm aware that the first edition is sometimes flawed, but it's good enough in general for my purposes.)

[darcydodo]

I'm quite happy with the web edition, although it would be nice to have a real, physical copy of it. I missed having access to it several times while I was in Europe!

[darcydodo]

My dad's childhood friend Jackie had one of those, and at one point he (perhaps seriously) offered to give it to me, as he and his wife never used it, but it obviously wouldn't have been polite to take him seriously and accept. And now he's dead, so there goes that chance!