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Orwell was also a racist. A lot of the criticisms of language boil down to old people complaining about the way young people are speaking. Rich people complaining about the way poor people are speaking. White people complaining about the way black and brown people are speaking. Language isn't written in stone, it evolves and changes over time the way fashions change.
Orwell was also a racist. A lot of the criticisms of language boil down to old people complaining about the way young people are speaking. Rich people complaining about the way poor people are speaking. White people complaining about the way black and brown people are speaking. Language isn't written in stone, it evolves and changes over time the way fashions change.
There's no such thing as linguistic devolution; that's silliness put forth by people who are triggered by language change.
There's a reason we don't sound like Shakespeare. There's a reason Shakespeare didn't sound like Chaucer. There's a reason Chaucer didn't sound like the anonymous poet who wrote Beowulf.
English has no rules, only conventions. Today's conventions are different than yesterday's. And those conventions to which people cling are themselves at a long line of change.
In sixth grade, I contradicted my teacher about using 's after a word that ends in s. She insisted Chris's is incorrect. It isn't.
You are right, of course. I feel strongly about this because I have a nephew whose name also ends with S, James. The old “spelling convention” was to write Chris’ book or James’ car. But if you say those out loud they sound exactly like “Chris book” and “James car,” which are obviously wrong and no one talks that way.
It's hard to believe that idea has never caught on
Oh, "official" grammar rules as taught in school are very different from the way people actually speak. Of course, I recognize that speech registers differ from formal written registers, but the written language doesn't have to be like nothing anyone ever actually said.
The influence of Latin grammar on English prescriptive grammar has been mentioned, and it was nothing but bad. For instance, the split infinitive, as in "to boldly go," or the preposition at the end of a sentence, as in "What did you do that for?" Do you know why these are considered incorrect?
Because in Latin, the infinitive is not two words as it is in English ("to go"), it is only one word. A single word obviously can't be split. And the word "preposition" is a borrowing from Latin and literally means "placed before." A "preposition" by its Latin definition has to be placed "before" something else, it can't be at the end.
And then some bright person or persons decided that since Latin was clearly the world's superior language, English infintives also shouldn't be split and English prepositions also couldn't be placed at the end of a sentence.
da prob lam wit right ing azit zounds can b summed up inda blink oven I
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