Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkdbejwi383 | Hacker News Reader

Americans are very stingy with prepositions:

American: I wrote them British: I wrote to them

This is very true, and yet the British government message about coronavirus is "stay home" rather than "stay at home". It sounds rather odd to me. I wonder if they chose it to sound a bit more casual and relatable, or just to match what people were already likely to be hearing elsewhere online.

It is a bit weird. As a Brit I would say that the first "home" has changed from a noun to a sort of adjective. It has the same type of meaning as fr example "busy" or "asleep". We quite often say "Sally is home" and it has a similar logic to "Sally is busy" or "Sally is asleep".

I think it's to fit on the podium because actually everyone is saying "Stay at home".

Stay home is more commanding, is it makes sense as a general order.

Just thank god they don't decide to prefix it with a hash to make it more trendy twitter-like youngster hipsters whatever like what the French government is doing (#stayhome / #restezchezvous). Now get off my lawn...

"Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives." has the ring of a Dominic Cummings slogan. It's in the same vein as "Take back control" or "Get Brexit Done". It's campaigning distilled down to the minimum possible words.

Edit: Interestingly(?), the government official leaflet adds an "at": https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...

The leaflet that came through my door says "STAY AT HOME". The Downing Street letter signed by Boris says "you must stay at home". I have seen "stay home" a few times, which I notice, because it seems like bad English to me.

"Every little helps".

Yeah this is a strange one, my brain reads "helps" as a noun here, it takes an extra beat for it to infill a ghost noun between "little" and "helps" ("every little bit helps")

Is that a correct sentence in either dialect? It doesn't sound well-formed to me!

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=749

Isn't that colloquial saying though? Trying to think of another good example... "It never rains, but it pours."

> "It never rains, but it pours."

I've never heard that construct. Are you by chance referring to Morton Salt's motto "When it rains, it pours"?

I think it was HN that lead me to the discovered not too long ago that the phrase originated from an early-20th-Century ad campaign of theirs following the introduction of magnesium carbonate, an anti-clumping agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Salt

No it is a colloquial saying in Britain, especially in the North of England. Me: "I hurt myself at work, then I lost my wallet and my girlfriend left me", Someone else: "It never rains, but it pours".

Your example reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8s9cNqZO4

Interesting!

In the US - in the Arkansas Ozarks, specifically - I've heard the other version in the same context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com