All done in spanish12/3/2023 Lydia Ramsey, Dottie Walters, Manners that Sell: Adding the Polish that Builds Profits, 2008 When you have finished eating, please don’t say that you are done. The “food is done” line has been a very successful one, and still appears occasionally today. Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer, 1965 It is proper to say “the roast is done,” but this does not mean it is finished it means the roast is sufficiently cooked. The word should not be used in good writing to mean finished or completed. Bernstein may have also been the person responsible for the culinary aspect of the “people are finished food is done” dicta. Theodore Bernstein, the author of a number of guides to language in the middle of the 20th century, did include an entry warning readers to distinguish between them, although he later changed his mind about this. Most usage manuals of the 20th and 21st century do not make note of this matter. MacCracken and Helen Sandison’s Manual of Good English from 1917. The earliest warnings we’ve seen against using done for finished come in H. ![]() There is a more recent usage (this is a be done sense, rather than the older have done sense), which seems to be the one that people don’t much care for, and this one dates to the second half of the 19th century. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage notes that done has been used as an adjective, in the sense of “finished,” since at least the 14th century. ![]() We are not entirely certain where the prohibition against using done to mean finished came from. Though some individuals object to the use of 'done' to mean 'finished', few usage guides agree with them.
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