Posted on 06/20/2012 6:30:54 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.
[...]
Mr. Garner, the usage expert, requires all job applicants at his nine-employee firm—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them. And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out.
"Twenty-five years ago it was impossible to put your hands on something that hadn't been professionally copy-edited," Mr. Garner says. "Today, it is actually hard to put your hands on something that has been professionally copy-edited."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
There is no “evolution”. There is simply change, and that change can be good or bad. It can be change toward standard english or change toward Ebonics. We, individually an dcollectively, get to choose, and if we choose wrongly the culture and the life of the mind is degraded.
That’s what evolution is, change,:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evolution
1. any process of formation or growth; development: the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.
Look they even used language as an example. And no you don’t get to choose, evolution happens. The most you get to choose is whether you’ll move with it or become an anachronistic. Evolve with life or fall behind the curve.
Evolution is not merely change. Please consult Mr. Darwin.
Those who control the cultural high ground do get to influence the direction of change. Non-prescriptivism, along with invented spelling and rain forest algebra, are simply the choices of the postmoderns in control of academia, the publishing industry, and the media.
Nobody said it was merely change. If you have a problem with that I suggest you take it up with Miriam Webster, because they say you’re full of crap.
You do understand that Merriam Webster is just a book with editors, and those editors are on the postmodern left? On second thought, probably not.
BWAHAHAHAHQAHAH
Yeah it’s all some big evil conspiracy.
Whatever dude. Face facts, languages evolve, and you’re full of crap. Now do yourself the favor of letting this thread die instead of resurrecting to say something ridiculously stupid on it every handful of days.
You don’t know much about the media, academia, and the publishing industry, do you, “dude”?
Have you looked up Merriam Webster definitions of words such as “fascist” or “homophobe” or “socialist” or “environmentalist”?
Right, I didn’t think so.
Get back to me with your analysis, if you are capable of analysis.
You don’t know much about the media, academia, and the publishing industry, do you, “dude”?
Have you looked up Merriam Webster definitions of words such as “fascist” or “homophobe” or “socialist” or “environmentalist”?
Right, I didn’t think so.
Get back to me with your analysis, if you are capable of analysis.
And you clearly don’t know anything about reality.
Languages evolve, this is a simple truth that has nothing to do with media, academia or publishing.
Nobody says “thee” or “thou” anymore
“Ain’t” IS a word
“Whom” is dead
“Humbug” used to be a dirty word
“Blogosphere” went from not a word to changing a presidential election in 4 years
contractions go in and out of vogue
These are all examples of our language evolving. Whether you’re smart enough to believe it or not.
There is no postmodernist conspiracy to make languages evolve, it happens, and anybody who thinks otherwise is a bleeding idiot. Bye now. No more of your moronic replies will be read, you are beneath contempt and a complete waste of time and bytes.
Not only do you have a reading comprehension problem, you continue to confuse change with evolution. Some changes result from new inventions,etc., but many are deliberate and driven by an agenda. One would think that anyone posting here would recognize the intentional distortion and manipulation of language that has been a part of the left/postmodern agenda for decades. Perhaps you need to read something on the history of “political correctness”.
As for changes that result from an increasingly intellectually degenerate population, embrace it if you like. Perhaps you should consider posting in ebonics or a hillbilly dialect. It might be a better reflection of your intellect.
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