Quote:Clary: If someone thinks less of you because you use woolly language or 'wrong' forms (as accepted by most of the Usage panels), that is a good reason to get it 'right'. It is doing a disservice to our children to teach or allow that sort of language in formal situations, just as it is a disservice not to teach them table manners.
You're looking at this much much too narrowly, Clary. Of course, we teach our children when to be polite but the misguided notion that we teach them the gradients of politeness is an old wives tale.
As the LGSWE states, paraphrased, the vast vast majority of people have poor intuitive feelings for the real workings of language. This means that we all know how to use the language in an unconscious fashion just as we know how to breathe but so very few really know how it works.
That's why these "magazine linguists", style book writers, armchair peevists get it so wrong so often. It's hard on the brain to read about something that is so complex {and language is, I assure you} so people love to run for the amateurs, easy reading, and well it's just plain fun. I can take this "argument" and use it to buffalo the next person I catch making this same grievous error.
Remember the posting on those "passive" sentences. There was another recent posting where a member "screwed up" according to PG. It sailed right by all these guardians of the faith.
Language has many different registers and the language that we use in them differs greatly. That's true, innit, Clary. A close look at speech within the home and then one step up to say, school, shows us how vastly different they are.
And children notice these finer distinctions and follow them very closely. But what's so hypocritical, Thomas pointed this out, but it bears repeating; so many of these 'rules' that these usage panels agree on are not language rules for any level of English. They are simply old wives tales.
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http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html
The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. 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.
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.
