

Shhhhhh! You’ll jinx it!
Shhhhhh! You’ll jinx it!
Edit-preface: I am not a grammarian. I don’t know what the technical names for the different types of “to” are or if they are even recognized as distinct by experts in the field.
English is does indeed use “go” to mean “go do a thing”, but not with directional “to” (as in “go to the library”).
“Go run!”, “Go running”, “I’m going running”, and “I’m going to run” are all valid uses. (In that last case, the “to” is not a directional “to”, but is actually part of the infinitive verb “to run”, as in “I want to run”). However, you wouldn’t say “Go to run!” to tell someone to run.
“Go to run” could make sense with a causal “to” (“Go, in order that you might run”) but that separates “go” and “run” in to separate actions. Causal “to” is the “to” in “push to open” and “press F to pay respects” this is not the “to” in “go to sleep”
“Go to sleep” feels like it is in the directional sense, like “go to bed”
Edit: Now you’ve got me thinking. “Go to sleep” and “go to bed” are a little unusual . “Go to [location]“ without an article is usually reserved for proper nouns or pronouns (“Go to France”, “go to Curicó”, “go to Walmart”, “go to John“ “go to her”). When the location is a general noun, you usually use an article or a proper/pro-noun in the possessive form (“go to a restaurant”, “go to the party”, “go to Bob’s house”, “go to your room”). So what makes “bed” and “sleep” so special? The only other case I can think of at the moment is “go to ground” and that is different because it is an idiom, and the rule for idioms is “they mean what they mean”
Edit-edit: meals don’t use an article either: “to lunch”, “to dinner”, “to breakfast”.
Edit-edit-edit: AAAAAH! It applies to some other prepositions too: “in bed”, “at lunch”; but not “under the bed”. What is going on‽
Edit-edit-edit-edit: Causal “to” might be a use of the infinitive case?
Edit-edit-edit-edit-edit: “go to work” does not use an article either.
Whoops! Slip of the thumb. Thanks for catching that. I was thinking “administrators of the Executive branch” and it morphed before I got it out.
“Judges”
I say that in “scare quotes” because they are literally not judges and it is not a court. They are not part of the judicial branch. They are bureaucrats of the administrative Executive branch that started cosplaying a couple decades ago to project an impression of legitimacy and finality.
I may be misremembering, but wasn’t there a thing 10 3 years ago or so where trains were randomly stopping somewhere in Europe. And I think it turned out to be a remote shutdown from the manufacturer (according to independent investigators. The manufacturer maintains that hackers added that code to their software) due to 3rd party replacement parts or an unrenewed service contract or some other anticompetitive behavior.
Edit: Jiminy Cricket! It feels like it’s been 10 years. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/manufacturer-deliberately-bricked-trains-repaired-by-competitors-hackers-find/
We all love the 1964 goth girl
Correct! It’s called a contronym, it is such a normal thing in language that they made a word for it.
Because it blocks those government heat rays. /s
Wow! What a headline: It makes it sound like DDG was compromised by Google.
It wasn’t.
DDG protects you from Google (knowing your search history, and which links you clicked from each search) while you are on the DDG website. Of course it doesn’t protect you from trackers once you leave DDG. For that you need other cookie and tracking blockers like PrivacyBadger, uBlockOrigin, and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection.
It is definitely an important point that up to 40% of US sites send user data to google, but that is not something unique to DDG. A more accurate headline would be “Google is tracking you even if you never use it.”
Oh, no. I only meant that the use in the figurative sense was more than twice as old as any concerted movement against it. And even that movement is “old”. This isn’t some skibidi Ohio dreamt up by “kids these days”. It has a well established pattern of usage.
The notion that “just because someone lived a long time ago, they must have been backwards, ignorant, or stupid” is one that needs to die a loud and public death. It is that line of thinking that leads people to believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, etc. because they are certain that folks back then weren’t clever enough to move large rocks about.
He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
– The History of Emily Montague, by Frances Brooke, 1769 (emphasis: mine)
The use in the figurative sense isn’t valid merely because of “some rando uttering a word” a long time ago. It is valid because it continued to be utilized with that meaning for the next 250 years and is still used and understandable in that sense to this day.
The opposite of what? I’m curious how you interpreted my words, because that quote does not contradict any claim I intended.
Except it literally does.
The oldest known record of that use is from the 1700s, and prescriptivists didn’t start whining about it in any significant amount until 100 years ago.
Nah. I just do little twerk and it shakes all the dribbles off.
2+2 = 5
…for sufficiently large values of 2
I don’t think pointing out that it took him 79 years figure that out is giving him credit for anything
I can cont on 0 hands how many airbases Iran has access to near the US.
A relevant “dishwasher guy” video just came out this week.
YouTube is where I watch the late show…