I was struck by the ‘to-morrow’ and the ‘to-night’ in the
Bram Stoker classic, Dracula. ‘To-morrow’? What kind of spelling is that? Well,
the answer is, Dracula was published in 1897, in English as it must have been prevalent
then.
1897 happened more than a century back. No wonder, the syntax
and the spellings underwent sea change in these 120 years. What perplexes me
more is that the language used these days is already so different from the one
taught to us, the Nesfield and Wren & Martin disciples. I find it strange
saying, “I have been receiving your emails”. What is ‘mails’? Doesn’t ‘mail’
remain ‘mail’, whether singular or plural? Same goes with ‘thrice’. Why it
can’t be a more gentlemanly ‘three times’? I get absolutely floored when
someone sends me an ‘invite’. What happened to the good old system of sending
invitations? Or, is it so that people now ‘invitation’ by sending ‘invites’? If
I pinch myself to be sure about the reality, it is to see ‘if I were awake’ and
not ‘if I was awake’!
I rise at ‘6:00 AM’, which is old fashioned. These days it is
‘6am’, something that I find difficult to adjust to. The same is true with all
other units which are now shown immediately after the digits. Should I write ‘10ohms’? I will, if you insist upon it, but I prefer
writing ‘10 ohms’.
I fail to understand ‘360 degrees apart’. Would you not be
exactly in the same direction if you rotate by 360 degrees? An advertising man
once asked me to send my ‘coordinates’. For a while I seriously thought of
sending him the readings of the longitude and latitude of my location.
I prefer to keep ‘anyways’ and ‘anywheres’ nowhere near me.
However, I have given up protesting when someone says, “I enjoyed the movie!”
Puritans insist upon placing an object after the verb ‘enjoy’.
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