Posted on 03/17/2015 7:37:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Its a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers cant 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 its how we see and hear people use the language.
Thats 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 arent real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I cant get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. Its just a convention that we dont use double negatives of that form in Standard English.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Here’s what’s happening, but it’s more obvious in academic, business and political administration.
The Marching Morons
By C. M. Kornbluth
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/kornbluthcm-marchingmorons/kornbluthcm-marchingmorons-00-e.html
It should since “irregardless” isn’t proper English nor is it a word.
Ain’t is always proper.
Test journalists for drugs.
Hand me a resume with a grammatical or spelling error and you'll be looking for a job with somebody else. I'm not interested in the rationalizations of stupid people who refuse to improve themselves, and I'm not impressed with educated people who excuse them; in fact they're worse because they have the training and capacity to know better.
The rest of your thesis is laughably preposterous. English became the lingua franca of the modern world because of the economic and cultural dominance of the Anglosphere in general and the ascendancy of the United States of America in particular, not because the French have a language committee.
Attempts to equate the ineffectiveness of the GOP-e with the general collapse of academic standards is a non sequitur so thoroughly divorced from reality that it requires no further examination.
I would agree that you are quite flexible.
So you spell like he did because “if Chaucer ain’t English, I don’t know what”?
Nothing is being defined down.
Rigid thinking about the language (which is many languages, always changing) isn't working for conservatives.
Again... which version of English are you pushing for?
Same thing as the GOP-E. They don't want to realize they can't automatically blame someone else because what they are doing doesn't work.
They are rigid in their thinking, and don't bother to teach.
/johnny
It's in the Urban Dictionary, and the accepted definition puts it in the same boat as "Can't get no satisfaction":
Used by people who ignorantly mean to say regardless. According to webster, it is a word, but since the prefix "ir" and the suffx "less" both mean "not or with" they cancel each other out, so what you end up with is regard. When you use this to try to say you don't care about something, you end up saying that you do. Of course everyone knows what you mean to say and only a pompous,rude asshole will correct you.
Excellent post. “Irregardless’. Good one.
/johnny
Nonresponsive. You were saying that the double negative absolutely and undeniably implies a postive, unless I missed your meaning, which I don’t know how I could have, since it was clear as day. But this just isn’t so, is all I mean to convey.
True dat my man. Blood be talkin’ ‘bout talkin’ proper ass ‘n’ all, I say f** dat s***, no what I’ talkin’ ‘bout?
“Irregardless...”
Regardless, unless you are into the double negative /:)
From the UD's definition #6 of "irregardless":
Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.
Check out http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19197/what-words-sound-like-opposites-but-are-synonyms.
You have to teach them that it's not preferred. Of course, teaching is hard work, and hand-wringing and whining isn't.
This argument about a single mythical english language has been going on for hundreds of years, and will for many more. We've had a few centuries of relative stability with some dialects of english after the invention of the printing press.
The invention of e-mail and texting will change the picture again.
Some people don't want to recognize that or bother to change.
/johnny
“That’s what the GOP-E is trying to do, and it ain’t working.”
I understood this message of yours the first 22 times you posted it.
UUUHHHHH, no comment.
I could care less, but I’d have to be dead.
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