Hey, Americans ...

[blamebrampton]

Do you ever use forms of cliché other than plain old cliché? Such as clichéd or clichés? I see it used in a manner that I would consider wrong so often that I am wondering if it is one of those wacky idioms that English develops up all around the world. Or it could just be young people today with their emo music and Twittering ...

Comments

[arcanetrivia]

Oh, okay, I see what you're getting at.

I would use "cliché" naked if I'm using it as a singular noun. For an adjective, hm. I know that I have done, but I can't describe what internal grammar rules would ask me to do so. It might be that there are none and I'm just sloppy about interchanging it with "clichéd".

As for how this came about, I think it may be related to the general trend in dropping -(e)d from past participle phrases, which usually annoys the heck out of me ("whip cream"? grraaaahhh elethian smash!) aside from cases where it's already well-established ("ice cream"). (How long does it take for something to transition from being sloppy and incorrect to being the usual form and relegating the old way to an historical footnote?)

However, there is also some slack in my mind for people without English as a first language; I notice particularly from the many Chinese and Vietnamese speakers we have here that they often seem to have trouble fully pronouncing the participle ending, and words like "whipped" and "mixed" and such come out with a kind of glottal stop at the end instead of the full -ed sound. (Not that this makes it correct to write it that way.)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Yes, most of your shifts in words come from shifts in pronunciation. And there are a lot of words spelled one way and pronounced another, like the Australian tumeric/turmeric (first spoken, second written).