Relative pronouns - that and who

My spelling and grammer suck but I try to express myself as best I can.

Frank is polarized to the point where some of his substance has transgressed into the fourth state of matter.

Rather a triple pun for those with physics / philosophic backgrounds and some knowledge of his prior postings.

Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

namely "who" refers to a person"“that” refers to a group or to a thing.

...and Richard Lederer "Play of Words."

Not going to bother with quotes...because I know that there are as many, undoubtedly a lot more, scholars who subscribe to the concept of "good English grammar" and "poor."

Some folks like to defy convention...and often I am one of them. That does not detract from what I said in the other thread...nor from the thrust of my remarks here. Language chaos would result from total disregard of rules of grammar…and what you and Steven Pinker are doing is merely setting arbitrary boundaries for what you accept and what you see as unseemly or unnecessary.

The Decline of Grammar

Geoffrey Nunberg


IS the English language -- or to put it less apocalyptically, English prose writing -- really in a bad way? How would one tell? The standard jeremiads of the Sunday supplements give only anecdotal evidence, and that of a curious sort; the examples of degradation that they present are drawn not from current plays or novels, which are grammatically and syntactically extra judicium, but from advertisements, scholarly papers, and -- most popular of all -- memos from college deans. It is hard to believe that any of these texts will survive even until the next century, much less that late-twentieth-century English will be judged by their example. Our picture of the English of previous centuries, after all, has been formed on the basis of a careful selection of the best that was said and thought back then; their hacks and bureaucrats are mercifully silent now.

But while it is understandable that speakers of a language with a literary tradition would tend to be pessimistic about its course, there is no more hard evidence for a general linguistic degeneration than there is reason to believe that Aaron and Rose are inferior to Ruth and Gehrig.

Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift. From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.


The long run will surely prove the linguists right: English will survive whatever "abuses" its current critics complain of. And by that I mean not just that people will go on using English and its descendants in their daily commerce but that they will continue to make art with it as well.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/decline/

There are no language scholars at all who subscribe to that errant, outdated notion, Frank. Why? Because it is simply unsupportable.

There are no language scholars at all who subscribe to that errant, outdated notion, Frank. Why? Because it is simply unsupportable.

...but when you take it to the extreme that there is no such thing as good or bad grammar...

Levels of Usage
In this book we use a number of terms to indicate different levels of usage to give you an idea under what circumstances a given usage will be appropriate. 9

Standard English Standard English is the language we use for public discourse. It is the working language of our social institutions. The news media, the government, the legal profession, and the teachers in our schools and universities all aim at Standard English as a norm of communication, primarily in expository and argumentative writing, but also in public speaking. Standard English is thus different from what we normally think of as speech in that Standard English must be taught, whereas children learn to speak naturally without being taught. Of course, Standard English shares with spoken English certain features common to all forms of language. It has rules for making grammatical sentences, and it changes over time. The issues of pronunciation discussed in this book mainly involve how to pronounce specific written words or written letters, such as ch or g, in different words. The guidance to pronunciation is not meant to standardize or correct anyone’s naturally acquired form of spoken English. 10

The name Standard English is perhaps not the best, since it implies a standard against which various kinds of spoken English are to be measured, and this is hardly a fair comparison. A better name might be Institutional English, Conventional English, Commercial English, or Standardized English for Writing and Public Speaking, but these names all have their own negative connotations and shortcomings. So, since Standard is what this brand of English has been called for generations, we use the name here. 11

Nonstandard English There are many expressions and grammatical constructions that are not normally used in Standard English. These include regional expressions, such as might could, and other usages, such as ain’t and it don’t, that are typically associated with dialects used by people belonging to less prestigious social groups. These nonstandard varieties of English are no less logical or systematic than Standard English. In this book an expression labeled nonstandard is not wrong; it is merely inappropriate for ordinary usage in Standard English. 12

Formal English On some occasions it is important to adhere to the conventions that characterize serious public discourse and to avoid expressions that we might use in more casual situations. Formal writing and speaking are characterized by the tendency to give full treatment to all the elements that are required for grammatical sentences. Thus in formal English you might hear May I suggest that we reexamine the problem? where both clauses have a subject and verb and the subordinate clause is introduced by the conjunction that. Of course, formal English has many other features. Among these are the careful explanation of background information, complexity in sentence structure, explicit transitions between thoughts, and the use of certain words such as may that are reserved chiefly for creating a formal tone. Situations that normally require formal usage would include an article discussing a serious matter submitted to a respected journal, an official report by a group of researchers to a government body, a talk presented to a professional organization, and a letter of job application. 13

Informal English This is a broad category applied to situations in which it is not necessary, and in many cases not even desirable, to use the conventions of formal discourse. Informal language incorporates many of the familiar features of spoken English, especially the tendency to use contractions and to abbreviate sentences by omitting certain elements. Where formal English has May I suggest that we reexamine the manuscript? in informal English you might get Want to look this over again? Informal English tends to assume that the audience shares basic assumptions and background knowledge with the writer or speaker, who therefore alludes to or even omits reference to this information, rather than carefully explaining it as formal discourse requires. Typical informal situations would include a casual conversation with classmates, a letter to a close friend, or an article on a light topic written for a newspaper or magazine whose readership shares certain interests of the writer. 14

Of course, these functional categories are not hard and fast divisions of language; rather they are general tendencies of usage. People use language over a spectrum that shifts from intimate situations to public discourse, and a given piece of writing may have a mixture of formal and informal elements. We use the labels formal and informal in this book as guideposts to give you a clearer notion about when it is appropriate to use a particular usage. 15
It is important to remember that formal and informal refer to styles of expression, not standards of correctness. Informal English has its own rules of grammar and is just as logical as formal English. You can be serious using informal English, just as you can be comical using formal English. The two styles are simply used for different occasions.

http://www.bartleby.com/64/13.html

I should have made it clearer. Sorry, Frank. I think that you are operating under the notion that we somehow learn the grammar of our language in school. Nothing is further from the truth.

'good' and 'bad' , correct/incorrect are words poorly suited to described grammar. What is used and it's not even that great, is Standard versus Non-standard.