I’ve seen “let alone” used on Lemmy a good number of times now and, at least when I noticed it, it was always used incorrectly. It’s come to a point where I still feel like I’m being gaslit even after looking up examples, just because of the sheer amount of times I’ve seen it used outright wrong.
What I’m talking about is people switching up the first and last part. In “X, let alone Y” Y is supposed to be the more extreme case, the one that is less likely to happen, or could only happen if X also did first.
The correct usage: “That spaghetti must have been months old. I did not even open the box, let alone eat it.”
How I see it used constantly: “That spaghetti must have been months old. I did not eat it, let alone open the box.”
Other wrong usage: “Nobody checks out books anymore, let alone visits the library.”
Why does this bug me so much? I don’t know. One reason I came up with is that it’s boring. The “wrong” way the excitement always ramps down with the second sentence, so why even include it?
I am prepared to be shouted down for still somehow being incorrect about this. Do your worst. At least I’ll know I keep shifting between dimensions where “let alone” is always used differently or something.
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That is a fair grammatical pet peeve. I have a pet peeve for when people use words for the exact opposite of their meaning. Not just your classic “could care less”, or other things that mostly just come from people mishearing the correct phrase, but using entirely different words whose definition literally means the opposite of what they mean.
A couple examples:
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I had a Facebook friend talk about how, before he went on a trip overseas for a few months, like 30 people threw him a surprise going away party. He described this event as “humbling”. Yeah, that giant group of people coming out to celebrate you in particular and personally send you off on your trip must have really took you down a peg. I’m sure it really lowered your ego and made you realize you aren’t important.
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I CONSTANTLY hear in tv shows and movies stuff like “I’m really anxious to get going. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.” The word is “eager”. You are eager for something good that you have been anticipating. You are only anxious for some upcoming event that you are dreading or that you are trying to avoid, something causing you anxiety, thus the word. You are anxious for the upcoming test you arent prepared for and you are anxious to escape the haunted house without screaming like a little girl at a jump scare. You are not anxious to earn a payraise.
I mostly agree with everything you said, but words can have multiple meanings like anxious:
- Characterized by extreme uneasiness of mind or brooding fear about some contingency; WORRIED
- Characterized by, resulting from, or causing anxiety; WORRYING
- Ardently or earnestly wishing
Dictionaries only add those later definitions because dictionaries document the dumb ways people use words after all the correct ways.
So, yes, words have multiple meanings because people use them in all sorts of dumb ways and dictionaries capture that.
What are your thoughts of the word, “awful”?
It’s awful!
I like it an awful lot.
See the problem with that is that I believe the 3rd meaning there comes from the common misuse of the word. Otherwise the connotation behind the word loses all meaning. It would be indiscernible in what way you anticipating an event if the word means something you dread and something you eagerly wait using the exact same phrase. “I’m anxious for dad to get home”, for example, should have the connotation that they are expecting trouble when their dad gets home, while “I’m eager for dad to get home” tells you that something good will come with dad’s arrival. But that third definition means “anxious” gives both connotations, or rather neither. If anxious is both an antonym and a synonym to “eager”, it’s a linguistically meaningless word. Why bother saying it at all if you also have to explain it or give additional context to understand which polar opposite meaning you intended?
So to your first concern, the link address it:
The word has been used in the sense of “eager” for a considerable length of time, with evidence going back at least to the 17th century.
How long does a term have to be commonly missed before it is just a common use?
As for your second concern, language isn’t separate from context. The use comes first in context and then we derive definitions. 🌍👨🏾🚀🔫👩🏾🚀
Again, not saying it’s not common use. It clearly is. But it robs the word of any meaning on its own and makes so that it has to be propped up by context to have any meaning at all. It’s not like a word taking on an entirely new definition unrelated to its previous use or it’s previous definitions being replaced by new ones. It’s newer definition is the exact opposite of its original and yet both definitions are commonly used in the exact same phrasing. Like I said, it’s a pet peeve. This newer common use definition makes the word mean nothing at all to the listener. I think anxious and eager are two separate words that should serve two separate purposes in language and making anxious mean both is dumb.
I think you misunderstand how meaning is created. Meaning is always contextual, not prescriptive definitions.
Is that why the dictionary defines every word with “it depends”, “hard to say”, and “I don’t know, man. You figure it out!”?
Derisive sarcasm isn’t useful here.
Definitions are still a useful tool and help clarify the semantic field. Dictionaries are a project that imply that meaning is dependent and contextual. Dictionaries attempt to capture it, for now. A word’s meaning depends upon its part of speech and can mean different things when present in different parts of speech i.e., row. Homonyms, of which contranyms like anxious and cleave are a subset of, can even exist in the same part of speech. “A bat flew past me” is a meaningful statement, but we have deferred it’s meaning until context reveals what type of bat. It could literally be either.
Etymologies can help understand how this happens. Or their transformation can be lost. Languages change. The word “ephemera” has nothing to do with fevers. Original meaning is not the supreme meaning. Connection to the original does not confer primacy. “Cleave” means to “stay close to” and “split apart”. When you look at how the same word from two different non-English sources enter English at two different times, you see how a contranym can emerge.
The meaning of a word is open to change from social circumstances. Just because it used to mean something like a one day fever doesn’t mean it still means that nor does it mean that it’s connection is either obvious, tracable, or necessary.
A fixed meaning has to be divorced from people and it’s use. Language is a reflection of the people who use it. Meaning has several points of instability. Only context can fasten it. Context is the only way meaning is reveal despite our anxious anticipation for its stability. We are ahead of the meaning when we prematurely seek it’s stability, clarity, and certainty. And when contranyms allow for double meaning, it can be an invitation to play. And is anything more human than that?
I parse “anxious to get going” as being overwhelmed in the interim: restlessness, beset by uncertainty (“did we pack the toothbrushes?”, “did we confirm the hotel reservation?”, “what does traffic look like?”, etc.). The eagerness is for the going itself, the anxiety is for the period up to the going.
My wife, for example, is always anxious about dozens of details and considerations in the lead up to a trip, but once we’re actually in the car and en route that falls away. I think a lot of people are the same, where they panic about little details up to an event, but once they’ve crossed the threshold from lead up to the event itself the prep panic disappears.
I parse “anxious to get going” as being overwhelmed in the interim: restlessness, beset by uncertainty (“did we pack the toothbrushes?”, “did we confirm the hotel reservation?”, “what does traffic look like?”, etc.).
That’s how that should be parsed, you’re right. A bit of a weak example on my part, because it can and should be understood exactly like that. But typically, in media, that is not the intended meaning that they are trying to communicate.
In regards to anxious: I suspect this usage is similar to “anxiously awaiting” just morphed slightly. “I’m anxiously awaiting a raise” makes sense as a sentence, but is a bit clunky.
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Reading internet comments is a terrible addiction. Having to see people using language wrong, and realizing it’s almost always a native speaker is just one of the pains it brings you.
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Shouldn’t the content warning be for Prescriptivism?
Prescriptivism is prescribing how language should or should not be used, and is generally avoided by all linguists who aren’t 19thC european aristocrats intent on using language as a class marker.
Descriptivism is just describing how language is used by its speakers, without passing judgement.
Ah hehe in my defense it was 4am :)
Prescriptivist takes should generally be reviewed while alert and sober, so that you don’t expose yourself to accusations of hypocrisy or incorrect pedantry!
Thanks for this, we don’t want to loose sight of the correct usage.
loose sight
Please tell me that was intentional. It’s the internet, I can’t tell.
Don’t worry, it was intentional. It’s one of my pet peeves although not quite in the same category as the OPs one.
My pet peeve is people who say, “I seen that yesterday.” And just won’t use the word saw, or the correct phrase with the word have attached, “I have seen that before.”
Bugs the piss outta me.
I didn’t know this, I don’t think I used it incorrectly before, but thanks to you I’m going to see this every time now and it’s going to bug me. Thanks for the infection, haha.
Let alone try to understand how to use it.
I wanted to highlight that this use of “let alone” is only for the negative construction where “let alone” means the same thing as “much less”.
In a more positive construction “let alone” means the same as “not to mention” while both not letting it alone and still mentioning it. The earliest reference in the OED is of this construction:
“I didn’t hide, nor wouldn’t from any man living, let alone any woman.”
Before this use, to “let alone” was to “leave alone” and dates back to the old English.
I’m not sure when the negative construction of “let alone” first emerged, but it’s no more than two hundred or so years old.
It’s not my pet peeve, but it does irk me. I’ll stand with you against the wronglings.
I can’t even use let alone idiomatically, let alone use it in an interesting way!
In “X, let alone Y” Y is supposed to be the more extreme case, the one that is less likely to happen, or could only happen if X also did first
Other wrong usage: “Nobody checks out books anymore, let alone visits the library.”
X = “Nobody checks out books anymore”: less extreme. People could go to be going to the library and choosing to read books there.
Y = “let alone visits the library”: more extreme. People don’t even go to the library, so they wouldn’t be able to check out books even if they wanted to.
Why is that usage not correct? According to you definition, it should be. We it the other way around, then it would be wrong (according to your definition).
Please explain.
You are getting confused because you are comparing negations. It’s “visiting the library” that is less extreme than “checking out a book”.
This is also more of an example of dependency rather than extremity. That is, “checking out a book” could only happen if “visiting the library” happened first. So you could say “I never even travelled to North Korea, let alone bought a souvenir there” – while buying a souvenir is small compared to travelling to NK, the travelling would have to happen first, so the phrase makes sense.
This is not confusion, but a different view point, just like 6 is 9.
In the previous example with the library, at least people are still reading books in a library. One should be happy that the library is being used. However, if people don’t even go to a library, that is more extreme because its existence will be futile.
“I’ve never bought a souvenir in North Korea, let alone traveled there.” is just another way to phrase the same fact from a different view point. Buying souvenirs is trivial and it would be trivial, if I had ever been to North Korea, and since I haven’t, it’s the more extreme of the two.
Do you understand now?
or could only happen if X also did first.
You can’t check out a book if you don’t go to the library. What I mean by more extreme is this, that it requires the first one as a prior condition, or is otherwise asserted to be less likely to happen.
My on the spot made up definition may not have been the clearest :)
First I’d like to clarify how I interpreted OP’s phrase: I think they meant “check out book” to specifically mean “borrow from the library”. Seems like you came to the same interpretation, but I just wanted to mention that for anyone else who might be confused reading this, because “check out” has broader usage that could just mean “look at” without any implied reference to a library,
In that context, “visiting the library” is a prerequisite of checking out a book, so it’s less extreme. You cannot possibly check out a book without first visiting the library, but you can (as you point out) visit the library without checking out books.
“Nobody visits the library” would imply that nobody checks out books, while “nobody checks out books” does not imply that nobody visits the library.
The part after “let alone” should already logically follow from the part before. If you were to break down the task into steps, it should follow the pattern of “nobody finishes step 1, let alone step 2”.
Step 1: Visit a library
Step 2: Check out a book from the library
Does that make sense?
I once read a David Foster Wallace essay where he pointed out the improper grammar of “the reason is because” vs “the reason is that”.
Now I see it everywhere.
English language learner here. Would “let alone” basically have the same meaning than “not to mention”?
“not to mention” and “let alone” are both typically used with the more difficult or unpleasant things after the phrase. The main difference is that “not to mention” is usually used to bring something new into the conversation or to imply that the thing you’re mentioning needs a whole separate conversation.
“Let alone” is a way to add emphasis when denying something. Usually phrased like “I didn’t even X, let alone Y.” Y being the thing you want to deny, X being some first step toward Y or just something related that isn’t as bad as Y.
Some examples:
“Did you kill Dave?” “I didn’t touch him, let alone kill him”
“Can you walk?” “I can’t stand, let alone walk.”
The first part doesn’t even need to be a complete denial as long as it implies the second part is impossible:
“Can you run?” “I can barely stand, let alone run.”
People literally use it wrong all the time.
Nobody who speaks English as their native language is using the idiom incorrectly.
They might not be using it traditionally, but if it parses it flies
You don’t need to explain descriptivism vs prescriptivism here. If they mentions one of these terms, they obviously knows what it means and why people could disagree.
Also, why narrow it down to native speakers? That’s the part you should have put more focus on, normally Descriptionists don’t care if the speaker says when pigs fly or if the lobster whistles on the mountain.
Thanks for the copy pasta.
I think there is a phrase (at least in my native language) ”X, not even Y” where meaning is the opposite - Y should be less extreme case. Maybe them mix this phrases?
