>A weather girl on the tellly this morning:
>
>"It's going to be warmer than what it was yesterday."
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>Typical:
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>"I'm not as strong as what I was"
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>Bear in mind that the "what" is a lazy modern English substitute for "that which", eg:
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>"That's not the same as what (that which) I found yesterday" is bad enough. Now substitute that in the sentence that the weather girl said:
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>"It's going to be warmer than that which it was yesterday." makes no sense.
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>Why not just "It's going to be warmer than it was yesterday." or just "It's going to be warmer than yesterday."
>
>This misuse is very common in England.

I think you are fighting an impossible fight. The language will always change, whether you like it or not. And the change is much faster today than it was only a few years ago, thanks to TV, internet and other kinds of international influence.

I'll give one good example from Norway. Here we often combine more words into one, which is not so much done in English. And it has always been so that the last part of the word is always the most significant part. For instance a firefighter is a person. If you leave out the first part, fire, you end up with fighter which still is a person. The same goes for spaceship, flowerpot and most other combined words.

A few years ago the radio reporters began to shorten the word "puddersnø" which means powder snow, and only said "pudder", powder. I have stopped counting how many times I have reported this and told them that powder is for your nose and for a baby's bum. Needless to say, now the word "pudder" is commonly used for this soft snow, only older people like myself (me?) say "puddersnø".