Recently, in keeping with my goal of getting people who have worked on identity to start supporting each other more, I nominated Pat Patterson of Sun Microsystems for an important award (the coveted Serenity Award as mentioned here).
I have to thank Pat for taking the time to answer me. But – and I'm not complaining about his obvious passion – his response read like this:
“Sorry to be a language bore, but… “dialog with them”??? Does every noun have to be munged into a verb? Is there anything that “talking with them” doesn't convey that “dialog with them” does? Sorry – pet hate of mine…”
I was “on the road” at the time, and assumed I must have lost touch with our mother tongue. Embarrased, I wrote back to Pat as follows:
“You are right. Hats off to anyone who still believes in language. So we'll talk instead.”
And indeed we are setting up time for that (and a glass of something, I expect) at DIDW.
But back at home, I turned to my twenty volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary for “cultural renewal”. And guess what I found?
Hmmm. I wonder if 400 years of continuous usage makes it? Est-ce que c'est une dialogue de sourds?
I'm feeling “intransitive” on this one, Pat. Looking forward to dialoging again, too.
