Posted on 03/17/2015 7:37:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can’t express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. A few weeks ago, pundits and columnists lauded a Wikipedia editor in San Jose, Calif., who had rooted out and changed no fewer than 47,000 instances where contributors to the online encyclopedia had written “comprised of” rather than “composed of.” Does anyone doubt that our mother tongue is in deep decline?
Well, for one, I do. It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books.
As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. Any toddler is already a grammatical genius. Without conscious effort, we combine words into sentences according to a particular structure, with subjects, objects, verbs, adjectives and so on. We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language.
That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I can’t get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. It’s just a convention that we don’t use double negatives of that form in Standard English.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
watdis ator meenz?
what a wonderful idea!
schools fail to teach the kids so now we can all decide it doesn’t matter if they learn or not, anyway
hey, does this “the answer is whatever feels good to YOU” approach....also work on math tests?
(if so, its 50 years too late to help me, dam&!!!)
Irregardless of this writers opinion, unproper usage literally makes my head explode.
Bull. A double negative is a positive. The second negative is a modifier which turns the first negative into a affirmative. Or to state the math rule, "minus a minus is always a plus".
So the speaker is stating that he does get satisfaction.
There is wiggle room for non-formal communications, but if you can't be understood, your point doesn't matter.
/johnny
This is nothing but political correctness because blacks from da hood speak such poor English.
That is the worsest thing I’ve ever hear :)
I could care less.
Is the word “Ain’t” still proper English?
Who axed im?
RE: I could care less.
Why as for me, I couldn’t care less...
Yeah, since Congress is always passing new laws, there is no point in supporting or opposing any particular piece of legislation....
/johnny
That was before Common Core came along. Who knows if it's true or not now.
Dat B gay.
If people don’t understand what you’re saying, it’s the wrong way to speak.
RE: If people don’t understand what you’re saying, it’s the wrong way to speak.
That makes a few of my former Professors educated ignoramuses.
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