I have noticed, with increasing frequency, the use of the word "anymore" in a positive sense. Somebody did it on Talk of the Nation today, though I've now forgotten the exact context... The kind of thing I'm talking about is, "I used to prefer chocolate, but I prefer vanilla anymore." The word gets used to describe an activity that started at some point in the recent past, and is ongoing.

From my point of view as a descriptive linguist, this is kind of fascinating; it's an interesting generalization of the word, which used to only be usable to talk about an activity that ceased in the recent past, and is expected not to start again. "I used to like chocolate, but now I like vanilla -- I don't like chocolate anymore." English actually does usually play fast and loose with negative versus positive inflections. (Anyone who speaks Spanish is familiar with the stricter version of this, the way that the negative/positive on the verb affects the use of words like "ningun" or "nadie".)

But from the prescriptivist, former-writing-tutor point of view, it makes my skin crawl. Quit doing that, people! It's not like the etymology of the word is unclear. "I won't do X any more." It does not continue. There is not any more of it. In the positive, you have to use "some" rather than "any". "Please sir, may I have some more." "I think I will jog some more tomorrow."

This may be the first widespread linguistic error/evolution that I have found even more annoying than the degeneration of the difference between the adjectives "nauseated" (suffering from nausea), and "nauseous" (which used to mean "so disgusting as to cause nausea in nearby persons" -- a synonym for "nauseating"). People have used it incorrectly for so long, and so widely, that M-W now has a usage note declaring that current usage is dominated by the "nauseated" meaning, and therefore people who think the word ought to mean what it meant for hundreds of years ("nausea" and its various inflections date back to the 16th century, and originally referred specifically to seasickness -- note the similarity to "nautical") before ignorant valley girls misappropriated it are "mistaken". I find that kind of rootless ahistoricism... nauseous.

Current Mood: annoyed

I've had two very positive customer service experiences in the last few months, and just wanted to record them for posterity -- so often folks tend to blog their complaints, but not give positive feedback when companies behave well.

Ideal Pet Products makes pet doors. I had one of their sliding glass door inserts years ago, and then used the cut-in doors at my last couple places, and Xta and I recently bought another door insert for the Sky Den. The cats promptly managed to break part of the door; I'm not sure if it was a manufacturing flaw in that particular unit, or if they were being particularly rambunctious, but they'd never managed to do that before. In any case, I was able to email Ideal, and they promptly offered to send a replacement part. Fixing it was as easy as undoing a few screws, putting in the new part, and screwing it back together.

Zyliss makes a variety of kitchen products, including rotary cheese graters. I bought this product because it has a wider barrel, which is good for coarsely grating medium-firm cheeses like cheddar and gruyere (which don't do so well in the narrow-barrel grater I use for hard cheeses. A couple days ago the handle on the coarse drum shattered. Although Amazon said their returns policy only covers things for 30 days, when I contacted Zyliss USA, they offered to send a replacement coarse drum, free of charge. So, yay.

I have to admit, I wouldn't actually buy this particular product again if I had it to do over; I like the larger drum, but the handle design is a little awkward, and you can tell it's a bit flimsy when you handle it. The problem is that it attaches at the rim, rather than having the drum closed on one side, or having struts across it, to allow the handle to attach at the center. Their smaller grater has the handle screw into a thread at the center, which works really well (and makes the disassembled pieces easier to clean). Still, given that I sank some money into it, I appreciate that Zyliss is willing to make some effort to maintain/service their product. If it breaks again, though, I'll probably just buy something else.

Current Mood: pleased