Today's five second mini-rant:

[conuly]

Nonstandard and informal are not synonyms. Dialectal and informal are not synonyms. Regional and informal are not synonyms. You can speak formally even if you're speaking a nonstandard regional dialect.

Everybody needs to stop saying that dialect words are, ipso facto, informal.

Edit: On a different note, omfg this dude.

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Comments

[ethelmay]

My immediate reaction (and this is just a tangent, in my usual fashion) is that C.S. Lewis, as a priggish 16-year-old, "corrected" his friend Arthur for having used "got" when Lewis thought he ought to have said "gotten." (I am not sure exactly where Lewis acquired that notion. Possibly he'd seen "gotten" widely used in older books, while modern English speakers [outside the US] tended to use "got," and he thought "got" must be modern slang.)

"It's from a lifetime as a native English speaker and a decades-long career as a teacher of English." - I hope this is a big ol' troll and this person has no students at all, but unfortunately I have met people like this.

[conuly]

Teens are allowed to be immature. I expect slightly more from people claiming to be adults.

[ionelv]

What annoys me the most is people that declare themselves authorities are most often anything but. To claim self as a "native English speaker and a decades-long career as a teacher of English", without the slightest hint of self-deprecation or humility given that English is not one standard language but a collection of largely intelligible dialects (one or possibly a few of which he speaks), is doubly sad.

[conuly]

I’m pretty sure that this was him lashing out after having tried and failed to back himself up.

[thekumquat]

Merriam-Webster not being a good dictionary? Yeah, you're right, I'm sure.

I'll have to seek out the song, because even knowing about cot/caught mergers, I can't figure how autumn and got'em can be made to rhyme.

[conuly]

I'm supposed to be so devastated by the way he criticized that particular dictionary that I don't even notice he had nothing to say about the rest of them....

[darkoshi]

> I can't figure how autumn and got'em can be made to rhyme.

Whereas I struggle to figure out how to pronounce them so they don't rhyme.

[conuly]

Round your lips while saying caught, dawn, autumn

[darkoshi]

You mean like the o sound in the first part of "or" before the "urr" sound ? (No, I guess not based on the sound samples on the below page.)
That makes the words seem to have a British accent to me; interesting.
I would have thought that for the two vowel sounds I don't normally distinguish, that the words you listed would be said with a more open mouth rather than more closed, for the people who do distinguish them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot%E2%80%93caught_merger

Yeah, I was wrong. They say cot with a more open mouth. So they must be pronouncing "got'em" differently than me.

[gingicat]

The most horrifying thing I heard yesterday was that Camp Mystic got a warning to evacuate an hour before and didn't take advantage of it.

[conuly]

It's infuriating.