How awful is the power of words

the kid who replaced his hard G sounds with soft ones, leaving me incapable of thinking of glasses as anything other than jlasses

kid who would holler "DID" any time she finished her work no matter how many times we told her to just raise her hand

kid who began her scary stories with "once a time" and her friend who began his with "paw time"

middle schooler i had during student teaching who pronounced magritte as "mah-gritty"

the kid who said "i got boogies comin out my nose" while sobbing and the kid who said "theres his puddle of cry" while describing a drawing, both of whom i think of when im crying

kid who said that if he was 80 he would get big and turn grandpa

kid who, for no reason in particular, would just say "like a little feet" as a standalone phrase in relation to nothing

kid who called snakes "nakes"

kid who called calculators "cockulators"

my little cousin who referred to anything he didn't have an immediate answer to as "vewy mystewious"

He hears a voice call out "Dinnae drink frae that, meester, it's a' fu' o' coo piss an' shite!".

Turning, the hiker sees a Scottish shepherd leaning on a stick, and he replies "I'm terribly sorry, but could you kindly repeat that in the King's English?"

All common English contractions did exist by the Regency period. However, there is very limited period documentation or scholarly research as to whether they were viewed as "proper" English or not at the time.

Contractions were first used in the English language sometime in the last half of the 16th century, and by the late 17th and early 18th centuries were approaching what most people today would probably consider over-use.

By the time the Regency era rolled around however, many older uses of contractions had already fallen, or were in the midst of falling, out of favor. 'Tis, 'twas, ne'er, e'er, e'en, tho', thro', etc., were mostly confined to poetry by the early 19th century (though 'tis seems to have hung on a little bit longer than the others).

The last half of the 18th century had also already seen the almost complete disappearance of the most common use of English contractions in the 17th and early 18th centuries - using 'd in place of -ed - as seen here in an example from the 1736...

The frequency of use of contractions in the Regency period specifically, seems to have varied greatly from person to person. Jane Austen herself used very few contractions in her novels compared to some of her contemporaries. Couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't do not appear at all in Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility or Emma, and all other contractions were used very sparingly.

In P&P, I counted one appearance of "I'm", one of "you'll", one "won't", two "can't"s, three "shan't"s and six "don't"s.

I compared this to Evelina, by Frances Burney (published in 1778) which (just in Volume One) includes: 14 occurrences of can't, 4 of won't, 35 of don't (vs only 15 of 'do not') and 11 of shan't (3 spelled shan't and 8 sha'n't).

Though couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't all appear in Evelina as well (in an archaic forms which included a space between the modal verb and n't: could n't, would n't, should n't), I did notice they are used much more by lower class characters than by upper.

There seems to be some evidence that negative contractions (those ending in n't) began to be considered improper English in the latter half of the 18th century, and subsequently generally fell out of favor with the upper classes.

The Grammatical Wreath... by Alexander Bicknell, published in 1790, specifically cautions against using contractions in correspondence with social superiors.

"And be careful in not omitting any letter belonging to the words you write; as, I've, can't, don't, shou'd, wou'd, &c. instead of I have, cannot, do not, should, would; for such contractions not only appear disrespectful and too familiar, but discover ignorance and impudence."

This very interesting paper (which you can view in full if you have a free JSTOR account) analyzes the grammatical trends found through 50 years (1730s-1780s) of the correspondence of writer Elizabeth Montagu. The author marked a significant falloff in the use of negative contracted modal and auxiliary verbs over the course of Montagu's letters. In the 1730s Montagu used un-contracted negatives 62% of the time and contracted 38%, but by the 1780s Montagu used no contacted negatives at all.

Granted these are only the letters of a single person and, as the author notes, could have many other explanations (age, change in social class, familiarity with the correspondent, etc.), it does seem to reflect what I've personally observed in writing from this period.

So the answer to your question is - yes, contractions existed and yes, they were in fairly common use - with the asterisk that how they were viewed by society is not terribly well documented for the Regency period.

So I'd personally say feel free to use them in any Regency era stories you may be writing, but do so sparingly with very proper or upper class characters.

If you're aiming for very authentic period flavor, you could also try throwing in some contractions that have fallen out of use over the past two centuries - shan't, mustn't, needn't, mayn't, etc. I'd especially recommend using 'shan't' in place of 'shouldn't' where appropriate, and also remembering that if you're using 'can not' instead of 'can't' it is always one word - cannot.

One thing that is period authentic, but I won't personally recommend to any Regency era writers (unless you want to throw some meta commentary on the chaos that is the English language into an epistolary) - is that no one really agreed where to put the apostrophe in wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't until well into the 19th century. It's very common to see the n't separate as in the examples from Evelina, but I've also seen wou'd'n't, would'nt, wou'd'nt, etc. etc. etc., sometimes multiple different ways within a single paragraph.

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

never capitalize country names (unless abbreviated)

em dashes are pretty cool

Enter Adriano Celentano: a top Italian rockstar. Effortlessly talented, deservedly popular, and extremely funny. Celentano decides to use his talent for evil. He composes a kind of a parody: a song that mimics English but is entirely gobbledegook, improvised to such an earworm you will find yourself humming it while doing laundry 5 years from now.

He performs it on Italian TV. It's an instant hit. Tops all the charts in Italy. And France. And Germany. And Belgium. Everyone goes nuts. It's a great comedy of American rock-and-roll. And of music itself.