Thursday, December 29, 2005

Continuing on and on

It is an infallible sign of incipient decrepitude and a hardening of the arteries that new linguistic tics overload the synapses and move the bowels. However, just to pass it on ...
Until not that long ago, phrasal verbs were made up exclusively of Anglo-Saxon elements: verbs such as get, make, take, etc plus in, on, out. Now there is the tendency to create them using a Latinate verb. That in itself is no big deal. It's just that the additional particle adds nothing. I came across two this evening reading to S2: continue on & radiate out (there were no complements). I ask you - what does on add to continue, or out to radiate? Bugger all. So why say it?
That is enough. The rest is silence. (Like Hell.)

No comments: