"Vinyls" and other audio related idioms.

I live in the (former) land of DuPont. Many many locals worked at DuPonts. Not sure if or where the apostrophe goes on that.
 
These stories remind me of my freshman year in college in the midwest. Living on campus in a dorm was a requirement for freshman, and we had one gentleman from Brooklyn who had heard stories about one of the supposed local past-times colloquially referred to as 'cow tipping'

The school was (still is) as renowned for it's agriculture program as much as it's engineering/aerospace programs, so attracted a healthy mix of folks from all over the country/world as well as local farm kids. The gentleman from Brooklyn, not being exposed to any discussion beef in his life experience, asked some of the locals on our floor, in his very strong Brooklyn accent, if they really 'knocked down beefs.' Once the local guys, many of whom had never been outside of the state, figured out he meant cow tipping, they had a good laugh and couldn't believe that someone from 'New York City' (which no one around NY says) didn't know the plural of Beef or that it came from a cow. By his perfectly acceptable logic, if chicken came from chickens and fish came from fish, well, beef must come from "beefs." The english language is, indeed, very inconsistent.

That said, there is a difference between ignorance (in this case I mean it simply as not knowing as opposed to being derogatory) and intentional slang. Perhaps there's also slang borne of ignorance as well as intentioned slang, where folks are having a bit of fun with the language. I don't think most folks have a problem with the latter, but do cringe a bit and move on at the former.

This seems to be upsetting some folks, but what can I say? U mad bro? :)
 
Seeing there are Lp discs and digital discs its confusing to the younger population. As long as its round and analog and is tracked by a stylus I'm happy with what ever they choose to call them. The problem a vinyl could also be a 7 " 45 rpm record. So for me LP is the preferred term.

Its like the old saying about I don't care what you call me as long as I'm called for breakfast and dinner.
 
sqlsavior said:
Unless you load up a changer. Then you're spinning several vinyls even if you're only playing one vinyl. Makes me dizzy!
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For better or worst, I have never used a changer, even as a kid my father hide the ones we had :dunno:
 
Pyrrho said:
That makes me think of old classified advertisements in newspapers, in which one paid per word. One would often try to save money by getting rid of all of the unnecessary words, just including enough to get one's meaning across. It was not cost-effective to try to be grammatical. Sometimes, people would try to save too much money and not convey their meaning effectively.

So, instead of "needs to be recapped," "needs recapped" saves 50% of the cost, just as "needs restored" saves 50% of the cost of "needs to be restored." It seems unlikely that the meaning is lost when one does that.

The same thing happens with text messages, though the cost there is in how much trouble it is to type on a tiny touch screen, so there is a strong incentive to try to minimize unnecessary verbiage, regardless of whether the result is grammatical, as long as the meaning is conveyed.

Since texting is very commonly done, it is likely to cause the language to change.

Making the language more efficient does not seem, in itself, to be a bad thing at all.

(I wonder how many of us will rue the day we decided to post in this thread, when some grammar Nazi points out careless errors in some of our other posts. Online posting is curiously informal for something that is so permanent.)
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In the deep south here; my wife's family never uses an infinitive...so everything 'needs cleaned' or 'needs patched'...drives me crazy but I keep it to myself. Wish they'd say it 'needs TO BE cleaned' etc.
 
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