The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #132499 Message #4053433
Posted By: Charmion
18-May-20 - 08:50 PM
Thread Name: BS: Language Pet Peeves
Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
On the subject of untimely death, I am always irked when I read that someone has been shot “by a gun”.
Latin has this neat thing where you put the noun in a special form (or “case”) to indicate whether it is the direct object (accusative), indirect object (dative), or something else but still related to the verb (ablative). One of the several things the ablative does is indicate that a thing is the agent through which an action happens, and you translate it using the preposition “with”.
I really wish English had an ablative case so journalists would write “by a bad guy with a gun”.