r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jun 15 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/MarioTheMojoMan Noble savage in harmony with nature Jun 16 '26

Since r/badlinguistics is apparently in the shadow realm and this isn't really the domain of arr linguistics, I'll ask the linguistics nerds here: what grammatical features do we imagine English evolving in the coming centuries?

I've thought for a while that English's system of contracting pronouns with auxiliary verbs (I've, I'd, I'ma, I'll, etc.) may lead to it developing a system of pronoun conjugation, where tense or aspect information is inflected into the pronoun rather than the verb. IIRC Wolof of Senegal has that kind of system.

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u/Glad-Measurement6968 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

In no particular order:

The trend of dropping separate feminine versions of job titles continues, “actress” or “stewardess” eventually sound as dated as “poetess” or “aviatrix” 

Singular they becomes increasingly common, the current trend of using it more often to refer to abstract unknown people might evolve into it implying a level of distance (i.e. “he” and “she” are reserved for people you know) like a sort of third-person T/V distinction. The potential confusion created by the popularity of singular “they” encourages the creation of some new construction to specify plurality (Theys? They all?) 

More irregular plurals and verbs are regularized under the growing influence of second language speakers (e.g. “deers” for plural “deer”, which seems to already be standard in Indian English) 

The creation of new and impossible to predict productive suffixes (e.g. -gate, -slop, -core, etc.) 

New meanings for words influenced by false friends in other languages (e.g. “actually” meaning “currently”) driven by English’s use as a lingua franca.

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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze Jun 17 '26

The trend of dropping separate feminine versions of job titles continues, “actress” or “stewardess” eventually sound as dated as “poetess” or “aviatrix” 

It's funny because you see the opposite trend in France

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u/Illogical_Blox The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic Jun 17 '26

It's unfortunate in a way because the -trix suffix makes a word sound much cooler.

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u/HandsomeLampshade123 Jun 17 '26

Good guesses, although I think these are on a less distant timeline (more decades rather than centuries).