Things that the swells like just the way they are?

However, this thread is in response to someone trying to learn the language today, to bring up Irish slang as rule rather than the exception is a bit far fetched.

It's not right that you should attempt to bully and be condescending to a person advancing an honest opinion, JTT, more especially since in this thread you have been wrong, even though you have attempted to move the goalposts.

I'm not going to pick through this again, for your benefit. Do not take this as an evasion, it is simply distaste.

Just because people do talk or use incorrect grammar or words isn't a reason to slap them on the back and say swells done... Sometimes wrong is wrong.

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.

The Decline of Grammar

Geoffrey Nunberg

...

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.

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

Giving Up on Double Negation

G Pullum
...

You have to learn this if you're going to make any claim to knowing English. Because if you believe that when the Rolling Stones play 'Satisfaction' and Mick Jagger sings 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' he is singing about how it is impossible for him not to be satisfied, you can't even understand rock 'n' roll.

A fully competent speaker of English knows how to work out the meaning of both 'I am unable to obtain any satisfaction' and 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction', and knows that the first of those would be suitable in a business letter and the second would be appropriate in personal conversation in a pub in Spitalfields or Pentonville. A person who cannot understand Mick Jagger's lyrics, even if they are written out on a sheet of paper (nobody can understand much of it when he's singing, of course, is not a better English speaker, but a worse one.

The way I see it, real class in being an English speaker involves understanding both the Queen saying, 'My husband and I cannot imagine anything nicer', and a Cockney speaker saying, 'Me old man and me can't fink of nuffink nicer'. Real class is being knowledgeable about the diversity of English as well as sensitive to the nuances of the different varieties. The status-obsessed grumblers who complain about other people's double negations do not have class. There is nothing classy about insensitivity to the complexity of the linguistic world around us. If you pay attention to linguistic diversity and appreciate the variety in your language, you'll find you can't get no satisfaction.

let's take BrE, as the Gold Standard.