Comment on Bernie Sanders Champions 32-Hour Work Week With No Loss in Pay
Intralexical@lemmy.world 9 months agoonly way to affect change is to lobby
Don’t want to be pedantic, but not American and don’t really have much else to add here.
This is one of the few times when the correct word is “effect”, not “affect”. “Affect (v.)” means to alter, or have an impact on. “Effect (v.)” means to produce, and to create an effect (n.) of.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Change is to alter something, not to create/produce something.
I wrote it as wanting to affect how Congress does things, to change what Congress does, to have an impact on Congress, which is what lobbying does.
I stand by my usage of the word affect, over effect.
Intralexical@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s a transitive verb. “Affect change” places “change” as the object. You’re not saying you’re altering the political situation or you’re altering Congress; You’re saying the change is already happening, and you’re merely slightly altering its direction. “Effect change” means “Make a change”, which is what you’re trying to say. “Affect change” means “change the change”, which is probably nonsensical in most cases you’d use it.
Also, “effect change” specifically is a standard idiom. “Effect change” shows up in the English language around 8X more commonly than “affect change” between 1800 and 2000, because “affect change” is a semantically incorrect misspelling of “effect change”. [1] “Effect a change” is also either explicitly defined in or given as an example usage in many major dictionaries, while the same isn’t true of “affect change”, because, again “affect change” is a generally incorrect usage that doesn’t actually make sense or mean anything outside of potentially very specific scenarios that don’t apply here. [2]
1: Google Books Ngram Viewer.
2: Defined in Collins. Used in example sentences by: Cambridge, Webster, American Heritage
I mean. Feel free to, I guess?
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If I was saying that the change already happened I would have said ‘affectED’ past tense, which I did not.
I’m advocating for something to cause change, I’m not saying that change is already in the middle of happening or has happened.
I stand by my usage of the word affect, over effect.
Intralexical@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Oh my god. You’re using “change” as an object noun after a transitive verb which itself has no connotation or denotation of creation or causation. That implicitly means you’re saying that the thing it’s referring to must already exist.
Yes! That is what “effect” means.
Yes you are! “Affect (v.)” already means “change (v.)”. “Affect (v.) change (n.)” means “change (v.) the change (n.)”.
It’s like if I said “This salt will really affect my spaghetti”. That implicitly says/presumes that “my spaghetti” already exists, or else it wouldn’t be able to be affected.
🙄
FFS, I explained the grammatical reasoning, and linked to historical usage data, and linked to four different dictionaries to back that up.
You know what, fuck it. I only mentioned “effect” vs. “affect” because I thought that was somewhat interesting and more obscure rather than annoying to point out, but if you’re going to just be obtuse about it I may as well have some fun and point out the various other grammatical and semantic mistakes too…
“The Congress app” should not have a definite article because the app you linked to is, per the app ID, developer info, and first line of its description, unofficial and unaffiliated with the U.S. Congress. “Representative” should be plural, though that’s probably just a typo. The second “despite” should have a conjunction such as “and” immediately before it. “Want” should be conjugated as “wants” after “citizenry”, because the noun it applies to in this case is the singular “majority”. “Affect” should be “effect”, because “affect change” isn’t a thing and is actually nonsense. The clause right after that, beginning with “that’s what the corporations”, is a run-on sentence and should probably be fixed with a conjunction denoting causality or reasoning. The clause after “involved” is also a run-on sentence, and should probably either be its own declarative statement or be semicolon-delimited. The third “to” on the second sentence of your next reply needs a listing conjunction right before it. And in your latest reply, the clause after “cause change” is also a run-on sentence and should probably be delimited by either a full stop or a semicolon instead of a comma.
Now I suppose I’ll wait for you to explain why you “stand by” these other plainly incorrect (and, frankly, inconsequential) errors as well.
It’s funny how you started out pretending to champion political change, and to be against frivolously “commenting about it on an Internet forum”. … I should know better.