The Awful English Language

So over on a Michigan sports blog I read, a writer used the clause, "...and it very didn't work."  I don't want to talk about the part where that's terrible English, grammatically speaking.  I want to point out the fact that it makes sense.  Not only that, not only do we understand exactly what it means, the fact is English is flexible enough that - once the grammar nazis like me get over the incorrectness of it all - it barely sounds odd.  You could make a somewhat plausible argument, in fact, that this linguistic atrocity has a connotation otherwise unobtainable with a correct construction like "...didn't work at all."  The use of the "very" adds a punch, an almost active not-working, to our idea of what happened.  It is a phrase one could use, say, of bureaucratic excess or some of the goofier stunts attempted by the proverbial frat boys.

Of course, I'm still a linguistic snob at heart.  If I saw that construction used, outside dialogue, in anything more high-falutin' than a newspaper editorial, I'd have a panic attack.  But since it was just a blog post... hey, I can admire the rhetorical effect.

Applied Linguistics

I've managed to not-really-learn several languages over the years.  On the whole, it's a good thing, but there's one major problem.  My brain has never quite managed to sort them into "English" and "not English".  As a result, I have a bad habit of peppering otherwise normal conversations with snippets of foreign languages, mostly German.

Occasionally, it sidetracks class.  Today, trying to get a student who was very quiet to speak up, I asked, "Was ist es?"

"...That's creepy."
"What is?"
"You spoke German."
"...Yes?"
"No one here speaks German."
"Well I do, a little."
"Well it's creepy!"