Random whinge
Because it's not really a rant.
British MP Joan Ryan has quit the Labour Party citing a culture of anti-Jewish racism
. Is that because antisemitism
is too long a word for her?
But one thing that does annoy me is people using quantifiers—adverbs—for adjectives that don't take them. Absolutes, as it were.
In the same article, Conservative Party representatives were quoted as saying that three of their MP had gone very, very silent
. The adjective silent
is an absolute, it doesn't require quantification and it doesn't take an adverb. It means no sound. Someone is either silent or not silent; they can be very quiet
, and even so quiet that they're almost silent
. The only thing that using quantifiers for absolutes emphasises, as in this case, is an inability to use the English language properly.
Grammar Nazi? Me? Yeah, and I fuckin' own it!
Yes, I know that antisemitism
may be also, and probably more commonly, spelled anti-semitism
or anti-Semitism
. I just wanted to use it unhyphenated to score petty points on the internet!