spendius wrote:Referring to the Usage Panel chichan said-
Quote:You have to understand the purpose of the panel. They are there to placate all the old prescriptivists. You can, for most intents and purposes, ignore their opinions for the panel consists of people who know their language well, they just don't know how it works.
They are like most people who tend to just unthinkingly repeat what their old school marm told them.
They do need to try to maintain a certain standard in the language for the legal profession and for drafting legislation and for research papers and such like.Allowing street usage,which has its own fascinations,would lead to all sorts of difficulties as it often does on these threads.It would take a Solomon to unwind some of Dylan's quadruple negatives for a jury but we all know what he means.
I would ban "quite unique" because it means nothing.It renders the sentence it's in into the quack of a duck.A judge would roll his eyes despairingly if counsel tried that on him.This fag I'm smoking is unique.I'd stop reading at a "quite unique".
More repetition of the ole school marm blather, Spendius. Language takes care of itself, it always has and it always will. Some judges might do as you say on 'quite unique', but then they'd be as mistaken about how language works as you are here.
You can, and you're welcome to, like all the misguided folk who have come before you, think you can ban anything you want to do with language.
" ... 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. "
