Re: CHAT: Worse Greek 102 (was: Bad Latin 101)

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:

>And if the answer to both the above questions is "no", then these people
>are lacking in logic as well as literacy.
While I commiserate, I think you may be over harsh with these
people. By in large, they are not linguists nor Latinists.
They have vague notions of how the western Classical languages
treat plurals. They then apply them often facetiously and almost
always haphazardly. Similar is the common over use of -itis,
which is a medical condition, for all sorts of things unrelated
to medicine.

I gather it must be very hard for someone educated in a particular
discipline to hear or read the lingo mangled so badly - but look
at it this way: This is simply langauge change in action. Perhaps
in a hundred years time these facetious terminations will become
more regularly used.

Padraic.