@Ionus,
You don't understand "pedantically", even when you're given a dictionary entry to read. These pedants that come up with these nonexistent "rules" are like you, but only in that they, too, can't defend their crap.
You don't even qualify as a 'pundit'. You're just a parrot, a squawking parrot that thought he would show off his newly acquired knowledge. Some knowledge, your defence consists only of scatterbrained confusion.
Quote:
Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.
To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts.
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.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
Describes your two silly silly rules to a T; they make no sense on any level, no one follows these prescriptive pieces of drivel.
Quote: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.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
Spendi was being exceedingly generous with you because you don't even have the brains to be a pedant, in the pejorative sense. Again, you simply parroted the nonsense of someone else, without, I must note, citing that "authority".
That's stealing, Ionus, that's dishonesty. What of your long family "traditions"? If they are/were anything like you, it's clearly just a tradition of being con artists.
You still haven't provided any source to help you defend the tripe you post here. But that's been the case for everything that you post here. It's all the misinformed/uniformed rantings of a wannabe writer who can't ever be anything more than a dumb grunt.
As Spendius so accurately noted, "I find a lot of Io's stuff to be incomprehensible. I can't see what he's getting at. I sense he has had a bad time somewhere along the line in the service of our culture and I make allowances for that."
