Why do people say across

The battle against hopefully is now all but lost, and it appears at the beginnings of sentences, even in formal documents. If you listen carefully, you can hear language change in progress.

For example, anymore is a word that used to only occur in negative sentences, such as I don't eat pizza anymore.

Now, in many areas of the country, it's being used in positive sentences, like I've been eating a lot of pizza anymore. In this use, anymore means something like 'lately'.

If that sounds odd to you now, keep listening; you may be hearing it in your neighborhood before long. By 'correct English', people usually mean Standard English. Most languages have a standard form; it's the form of the language used in government, education, and other formal contexts.

But Standard English is actually just one dialect of English. What's important to realize is that there's no such thing as a 'sloppy' or 'lazy' dialect. Every dialect of every language has rules - not 'schoolroom' rules, like 'don't split your infinitives', but rather the sorts of rules that tell us that the cat slept is a sentence of English, but slept cat the isn't.

These rules tell us what language is like rather than what it should be like. Sentence l follows the rules of Standard English; sentence 2 follows a set of rules present in several other dialects. Neither is sloppier than the other, they just differ in the rule for making a negative sentence.

In l , dinner is marked as negative with any ; in 2 , it's marked as negative with no. The rules are different, but neither is more logical or elegant than the other. In fact, Old English regularly used 'double negatives', parallel to what we see in 2. Many modern languages, including Italian and Spanish, either allow or require more than one negative word in a sentence.

Sentences like 2 only sound 'bad' if you didn't happen to grow up speaking a dialect that uses them. This is said to be 'ungrammatical' because thoroughly splits the infinitive to water. Why are split infinitives so bad? Here's why: seventeenth-century grammarians believed Latin was the ideal language, so they thought English should be as much like Latin as possible.

In Latin, an infinitive like to water is a single word; it's impossible to split it up. So today, years later, we're still being taught that sentences like 3 are wrong, all because someone in the 's thought English should be more like Latin. Here's one last example. You notice it because it's different from the way you speak. In reality, everybody has an accent - in somebody else's opinion!

People have trouble with sounds that don't exist in the language or languages that they first learned as a young child. We are born capable of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages.

In infancy, a child begins to learn what sounds are important in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. By the time you're a year old, you've learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don't matter in your own language. The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language. German speakers learning English, for example, are likely to have trouble with the sounds found at the beginning of the words wish and this, because those sounds don't exist in German.

So they may pronounce them instead as v and z - similar sounds that do occur in German. It's well known that native speakers of Japanese often have trouble with the English l and r sounds. This is because the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between these two sounds. For this reason, Japanese speakers learning English find it hard to produce the right one at the right time, and they also have a hard time hearing the difference between English words like light and right.

An English speaker would have similar problems trying to speak and understand Thai, which distinguishes between 'aspirated' and 'unaspirated' p. To see the difference, hold your hand in front of your mouth and say the words pot and spot. If you say the words naturally, you should feel a small puff of air against your hand when you say the p in pot but not when you say the p in spot. In English, p is always aspirated that is, it has that puff of air at the beginning of a word like pot , but not when it occurs after s.

For an English speaker, trying to say pot without that puff of air is extremely difficult, and it would also be very difficult to hear the difference between a word like pot with and without that puff of air. In Thai, however, aspirated and unaspirated p are as different as English l and r. Using one in place of the other completely changes what word you've uttered for example, from 'forest' to 'split' , just as replacing l with r in English would change lip to rip.

Because English has different rules for the use of aspirated and unaspirated p , an English speaker learning Thai will make the same sorts of mistakes that a Japanese speaker makes in using English l and r. Learn More About across. Time Traveler for across The first known use of across was in the 13th century See more words from the same century.

Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of across Entry 1 of 2. Kids Definition of across Entry 1 of 2. Kids Definition of across Entry 2 of 2. My grandparents live across the street. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. A fountain is a place you throw coins in….

Yes, I live in Wisconsin. In my studies to teach English as a Second Language, we were instructed to explain those terms as: a couple is 2, a few is 3 or 4, several is 5 or 6 and many is more than that. If you mean 3, 4, 6, 7, etc.

The only thing I can say for sure is a couple means two. This is closest to my belief, but I was taught that a couple was 2 or 3, no specifically either. This was because why would you call 2 a couple? I would say if a couple people got knocked down it was 2 and if you meant more than 2 people got knocked down, you are saying the wrong word. A couple meaning 2 just makes sense. I was taught a few meant 3 or more but not a lot. I heard my Granddaughter tell a story and she said a couple.

She told it again and it was a 3 or 4. I asked how many 2 or more? She said idk a couple. I said a couple is 2, she said well more than two but I am not sure, I said if your sure it was more than 2 but not many use a few. One of the many things I do that makes me realize I have turned into my mother. I just had a discussion about this and after looking up what those words really mean I was confused.

My thought all these long years is that 2 is a couple, a few is 3 and several meant 7 or more it seemed to me the first 4 letters seve gave it away. Everything else was a specific number. A number a large number!

It was very tongue-in-cheek, but I have been unable to locate it or any mention of it in recent years. It had entries like the ones in this thread, but also things like Many, Most, All represented as varying percentages , etc.

I wish I could resurrect it from wherever it went! My husband wanted to be a diver in USN. The dictionary defines Several as more than two but not many. Several, few, handful, bunch and some. These have no numerical significance. If you want to say an exact amount you would use the number.