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Usenet Posted 23 years ago
Usage
On mass
Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting:
yet users all over the internet are still (on mass!) opening these bloódy unsolicited attachments!
I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.
Anyone know how common this is?
(Googling for frequency seemed to be a dead end, as there were far too many legitimate uses for "on mass" books and conferences on mass graves, on mass spectrometry, on mass media, on mass storage......)
Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 21 years.
(for e-mail, change harvey to whhvs)
yet users all over the internet are still (on mass!) opening these bloódy unsolicited attachments!
I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.
Anyone know how common this is?
(Googling for frequency seemed to be a dead end, as there were far too many legitimate uses for "on mass" books and conferences on mass graves, on mass spectrometry, on mass media, on mass storage......)
Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 21 years.
(for e-mail, change harvey to whhvs)
Top answer
Harvey Van Sickle (Email Removed) burbled [nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ... [/nq] It used to be that in order to be considered literate, one had to know French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek in addition to English. I would call this an understandable phonetic transcription by someone monolingual and unless the definition of "literate" is stipulated as "able to read and write English at the 9th-grade level or above" who is also illiterate.
- Harvey Van Sickle (Email Removed) burbled [nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ...
- [/nq] It used to be that in order to be considered literate, one had to know French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek in addition to English.
- I would call this an understandable phonetic transcription by someone monolingual and unless the definition of "literate" is stipulated as "able to read and write English at the 9th-grade level or above" who is also illiterate.
- That's a pretty snooty judgment, I'm aware, but the poster doesn't even know English sufficiently well to know the difference between "on mass" (which means nothing to me in this orthographic form) and "en masse" (which means something to me and every other person literate in English and other western European languages).
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2 Answers
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Harvey Van Sickle (Email Removed) burbled
[nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ... I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.[/nq]
It used to be that in order to be considered literate, one had to know French, German, Ital
[nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ... I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.[/nq]
It used to be that in order to be considered literate, one had to know French, German, Ital
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Okay, so this one time? In band camp? Harvey Van Sickle was all, like:
[nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ... I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.[/nq]
Somehow it reminds me of an actress I heard describing how the
[nq:1]Came across this in another group this morning (in a thread about the current virus), and found it interesting: yet ... I'd not come across "on mass" before, but it strikes me as an understandable mistranscription rather than an illiterate usage.[/nq]
Somehow it reminds me of an actress I heard describing how the
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