it's been a gradual shift in common usage

It's in Webster's 1913. That's why I don't get why it's an issue in 2012. It feels like that hurdle has been leapt already.

I can be anal with the best of them, but if I don't have any living relatives that lived during the official change in usage, I'm pretty much good with letting it slide.

Anyway, now I'm preoccupied with how brachiosauruses have sex.

Can “data” be a mass noun now? Please?

I do not correct people's spoken English, although when some people say, "I feel nauseous," I think, "You're certainly having that effect on me." I'll probably always change "I feel nauseous" to "I feel nauseated" in written copy. After all, I still care about the distinction between different from and different than.

That's so hot.

What? I mean it.

The good ship Hopefully may have sailed, but I wasn't on it. I'll admit that mute for moot is one of the things I have corrected in public. A colleague, who was theoretically a writer, kept using it over and over in staff meetings, until I started to have uncontrollable eye rolls. Not only was she pronouncing it wrong, but also she was also using it mainly in reference to points she didn't want to talk about, such as why she misspelled someone's name in an article.

Yeah, mute for moot is simply the wrong word.

Nauseous and hopefully, at least for me, are more in the category of "Strunk and White is a shit guide." t duck-n-run

are more in the category of "Strunk and White is a shit guide."

I can't betray my first love.

I did once have a big old crush on Strunk and White, but that was because it was the first conversational guide I'd ever read. Now I'm good with picking and choosing whose advice I take, but then I was just so fucking glad someone was telling *people* how to compose English correctly.

Not, of course, realising, that only nerds and people forced to were reading it. Oh, oops, the choir and the resentful.

According to the OED, nauseous entered written English as "feeling ill," but that meaning was later considered obsolete, replaced by nauseated for feeling ill.

But wait! Wouldn't the true pedant's perspective be to deplore that first shift, and welcome the popular effort to reclaim the original meeting? Drive back the forces of 18th century popular misuse?

It has taken me over a week to figure out how to download something I bought because the link to download on the "order status" page is not underlined. I thought we had an understanding, internet.

Hivemind math advice requested: someone on another website is claiming that "studies show" that a woman who's been on oral contraceptives for 3 years increases her cancer risk by 1000%. Which is pretty obviously nonsense--I remember just enough of How To Lie With Statistics to feel pretty confident in calling it nonsense, but I'm kind of a numbers moron myself and can't figure out how to quantify the idiocy.

Can anyone who's mathier than me take a crack at it? I know the ACS current lifetime risk estimate for the average USian woman is 1 in 8; and the Guttmacher Institute says that the US has approximately 43 million reproductive age, sexually active women, of whom about 10.7 million are on the Pill, most for at least 3 years over their lifetimes, if not a whole lot longer. I'm pretty sure all those numbers add up to "1000% is a completely crack-addled junk stat you just pulled out of your ass," but I'm not sure why, and I'm getting a math-anxiety stomachache just thinking about it. Help a sister out, anyone?