"Whence" means "from where". So "from whence" means "from from where".
Plain words are usually the best words. It grates when people use fancy words without knowing what they mean, just to seem erudite. It has the opposite effect.
I know it's pedantry. I'm a pedant. I also object to using "literally" to mean "not literally". These abuses are to me like fingernails on blackboards; I flee the room, rather than trying to read on.
Citing your reply to Merriam-Webster doesn't reassure me that these abuses are non-abuses; Merriam-Webster is the arch-descriptivist among lexicographers. They will document any kind of abuse of words, and declare it to be authentic English usage. You will never learn correct usage by consulting Merriam-Webster.
It is authentic English usage. That is, the words are actually used that way, whether you like it or not.
Attempts to define "correct" usage that are not descriptivist are... arrogant. Elitist. Attempting to hold back the tide. And doomed to failure. We'll use the words how we please. If you don't like it, we'll ignore you.
This isn't science, where there are "correct" answers. There's no objectively correct definition of any word. Languages are defined by how they're used.
(Note well: I am not saying that anyone can make up any definition they want for a word. They can't. I'm saying that the speakers of a language, as a whole, define words by how they use them. You can't hold back that tide, no matter how much you wish to.)
> Attempts to define "correct" usage that are not descriptivist are... arrogant. Elitist. Attempting to hold back the tide. And doomed to failure.
Well, there is a little more gray area around dead languages.
The Latin that gets used to publish 18th-century scientific papers is oddly close to the languages actually spoken by the authors in the 18th century. This means that, for us, 18th-century Latin is much easier to read than De Bello Gallico is, even though Julius Caesar is known today for the simplicity and clarity of his prose.[1] So there's room to say that while 18th-century scientific Latin is Latin, it's not great Latin and probably indulges in some constructions that a native speaker would have perceived as straight-out errors.
But to make this observation we have to be willing to conceive of some Latin as being correct and some as being wrong, even though all the samples from both groups are plainly identifiable as Latin. And while it's very clear in the example which variety of Latin should be "correct", and it's less clear when sampling two living varieties of a living language... the argument isn't really any different.
[1] Exactly the same thing happens in classical Chinese, where as time marches on, documents are still written in classical Chinese, and there's an obvious difference between classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese... but the later the authorship of the document is, the more likely its classical Chinese is to include some vernacularisms.
I agree that "literally" is used to mean "not literally".
My beef is that such usage diminishes the language, rendering that word ambiguous.
And I claim that a significant minority of readers find these usgaes sufficiently jarring that they stop reading, or at least have their attention diverted from the writer's meaning. Therefore I think these usages should be avoided, simply in order to achieve the writer's intent. And I think lexicographers should signpost usages that are likely to repel some readers.
Dictionaries are used (a) to help decode a text, and (b) to help construct a text. In the former case, you need a descriptivist lexicon, in case the text involves dubious usages. In the latter case you need a lexicon that at least warns you that certain usages are annoying to some people.
Why isn't it arrogant to make language ambiguous in a way that it hard to ever recover from? Prescriptivism tries to preserve the information content of language.
We can all communicate if we speak the same language. We can't if language forks until a million incompatible variations.
Prescriptivism has various goals according to its various exponents. One very traditional goal is to preserve modes of speech that have become obsolete, or to avoid modes that are perceived as innovative. But that has nothing to do with information content.
Complaining that an element of the sentence is being marked twice instead of once is also an odd way to "try to preserve the information content of the language". The more times something gets marked, the more obvious the informational content carried by the marking becomes.
Usage is an important signifier of social status. There are plenty of dialects that signal high or low status depending on who one is talking to that one is free to speak, but being competent in one’s culture’s prestige dialect is a valuable skill.
In their rush to bless every passing linguistic fad, M-W comes off rather preachy, even prescriptive, in their supposed descriptivism. Worse they’re not even good at it. If one wants the bleeding edge of living language then urban dictionary is a far superior resource. M-W is a bad dictionary.
(A) Whence was the form of the word where required by the preposition from.
(B) Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the committees compiling the King James Bible[1] were all unaware of how to speak their own language.
[1] This one could be true! The KJV was written in intentionally archaic language. But it was also a major project receiving serious attention from the best people.
Except it's perfectly correct English to say "I'm literally dying over here" in response to a funny joke.
What rules of English are you following with your pedantry? Is it just...English from 1900 or so? Whatever the answer, I guarantee you there was a pedant just like yourself from that time period lamenting how broken the English of the day was.
Not at all; I've no interest in preserving some historic or literary register in aspic. And incidentally, I don't think the writings of an Elizabethan poet are a good guide to contemporary usage.
Shakespeare wrote "hoist by his own petard", a phrase that's widely quoted. But I wonder if Shakespeare actually knew what a petard is; it's a bomb placed against a door or gate, to blow it open. It's not obviously the kind of thing you could hoist someone by.
> I've no interest in preserving some historic or literary register in aspic
That sounds like what you're doing with trying to lock down "literally".
Hoist would be "blow up"/"thrown into the air". He was blown up by his own bomb.
That leaves the question of what English you find actually "correct", and why you chose that English, rather than the English spoken 30 years before or after that correct English.
> That sounds like what you're doing with trying to lock down "literally".
The "literally" thing is particularly egregious, because the new definition is the opposite of the old one. Look, I dig metaphor; I'd be OK with "literally" being used to mean "metaphorically" if it was done occasionally and ironically. When it becomes the preferred word to replace "very", it's natural to resist.
> He was blown up by his own bomb.
Oh I see, thanks; that's bewildered me since forever. It makes my point, though; Shakespeare may be a marvellous composer of iambic pentameters, but he's not a good reference for modern english.
> what English you find actually "correct"
The correct register to adopt depends on the circumstances. As it happens, I never adopt a register in which "literally" means "figuratively". In speech I use a vernacular register (and I curse more than I would prefer). But in HN comments, I think it's often (not always) helpful to try to avoid ambiguity, and use language precisely. Not everyone here understands puns and allusions in English.
I'm late to this party, but isn't it reasonable to read this metaphor as a bomb's premature detonation causing the bomb-setter to be lifted into the air by the explosion?
There's nothing wrong with having a hobby, but you should assume that most people don't find it as fun as you do. If you want to stop reading when you see a word or phrase you don't like, just do that, there's no need to leave a public comment.
"Whence" means "from where". So "from whence" means "from from where".
Plain words are usually the best words. It grates when people use fancy words without knowing what they mean, just to seem erudite. It has the opposite effect.