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Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'
Pikoro writes: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explains why the concept of a "proper" English isn't realistic. Quoting: "It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. ... As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. ... We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. ... That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
But it's damn certain there is Improper English.
That's unpossible.
Should be: Why They're Ain't Any Such Thing as "Proper English."
Your welcome.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There are more people studying English in China than the entire population of England. The English language does NOT belong to the native speakers - it belongs to the world. It is the "lingua franca" of our age (and doesn't that phrase piss off the French!).
The article doesn't explain why there is no prescriptive body for the English Language; something that would be equivalent to the Acdemie fancaise. Instead it discusses how English lacks a prescriptive basis, and how it becomes incumbent upon the speaker to match their use of the language their audience and purpose for speaking.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions."
Some of us pedants are aware of how non-grammar the "grammar" rules are, and actually champion wider usage!
Double negatives are totally awesome, and there's no reason to think they're bad. Split infinitives are totally ok too, because the "to" is not actually part of the real English infinitive! And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do. Because it's not a preposition, it's a component of a complex verb.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Difference is the American English is taking over the British English. American culture is invading everywhere through movies and dramas, news etc... Why not just accept once and for all that English is, from now on, American English?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...
In spelling, Norwegian has two methods of writing: Nynorsk, and Bokmål... one is more like Swedish, the other is more like Danish, respectively...
But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible. There is less different between the Scandinavian languages than Spanish and especially Arabic.
There is less difference between Romanian and Moldavian than there is between American and British English, yet some Moldavians insist that they speak a different language in order to create an "us vs them"
Linguists know that a language is just a dialect with an army.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
However, it has nothing to do with purity. English is famously a language which mugs other languages for their vocabulary. But just because it is impure and inconsistent doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
unloyal dahlia cloud blacklegged gwyniad timorously. Denoting cobb browser emulsifier kearney underthroating flowage drysdale. Outsprue antipolitics handwrought palatable phosphatized preliberated fico overheadiness. Or maybe not.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
One manager was really bothered by "my bad", which used to be "my mistake". He called it "gang slang". "My bad" has slipped into common usage it seems to me. I'll avoid it around him, but he came across as a fuddy-duddy. He should be thankful people admit their mistakes, something uncommon around here.
Table-ized A.I.
There may not be such a thing as proper English, but yours is still bad!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
people shouldn't say "For all intensive purposes" or "should/could/would of"?
Born to Play
The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yipppppppeeeeeee!!!!! is now official English!
Yippppeeeeeee!!!!!!
You misspelled it the second time.
Yes, a language is a dynamic thing. The rules are constantly changing, and what was 'unacceptable' to purists is okay for casual use, and what was casual use only ten years ago might be perfectly acceptable even in rigorous settings today.
Further, English is a very agglomerative language; it's turned out to be astonishingly tolerant of loan words, adoptions, etc from other languages freely. Thus, at least in American English particularly, there's a tolerance (largely, I suspect, due to our immigrant past) for odd phrasings, word orders, or odd usage that eventually may become common parlance.
NEVERTHELESS, as much as it's getting down into the weeds of linguistic OCD to insist (or not) on the Oxford comma, or avoiding prepositional endings, or on specific adjectival orders (there's a rabbit hole if you want to see grammarians duking it out), that doesn't mean that there aren't rules of usage that are common for understanding, or that "there are no real rules at all" as this article seems to claim.
Yes, it's very intellectual to assert there are no rules, but a normal person recognized that's stupid: of COURSE there are rules. Are they regularly ignored? Sure. Should they be? It depends on context; if you're talking with your friends "u" is probably a perfectly acceptable replacement for "you". If you're writing a business letter, it will simply make you look like a moron.
If someone points it out to you, Insisting with sophomoric sincerity that "well there really are no rules in English anyway" will simply certify their opinion.
-Styopa
I blame Murdoch.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides. Still, following the rules in a major style guide will help you stay well within the rules for understanding.
"This reads like a liberal's didactic epistle to instruct the hidebound linguists that the lazy, ignorant and uneducated are their equals, particularly the minority youth and valley girls who might invent or redefine words to describe something because they "zoned out" during that learning opportunity in school. We mustn't judge."
As for my own words... the article purposely mixes the subject of language evolution (which is understandable) and just abandoning all the rules altogether. It is something straight out of the film "Idiocracy", and the more people stupidly embrace the notions of this article, the scarier our current reality is.
modern English grew out of Old English
Actually it grew out of a combination of Old English and Medieval French.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren't real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.
These conventions are what make communication possible between the old and the young, the past and the present. The speeches of Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King resonate to this day, without translation.
It will also help you succeed in society.
While everyday English may become less and less formal, you will still need to know formal English to succeed in academia and the workplace. While more people may speak ebonics or write textspeak or whatever and not be stagmatized so much by their peers or even society as a whole, these people will never get a job speaking or writing like that. Teaching formal English is more important than ever.
That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.
Actually, in Europe (at least where I live) we do study British English in schools. But then people learn American English because of America's cultural supremacy.
Before a bunch of French speaking Vikings invaded in 1066, before Nordic speaking Vikings degraded the language.
THAT is proper English!
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Comparing French to English is completely nonsensical. The former has a department regulating the development of language and purity laws that preserve the language and its use. The latter is an all out clusterfuck where the abbreviations LOL, and WTF end up in the Oxford English dictionary simply because they are in "common use".
So if the primary dictionaries are based on common use, what then determines proper use?
If there were rules set fast in stone 500 years ago, then every single one of us who speaks English would be breaking most of them. Even if rules were carved out 100 years ago most of us including English professors would be breaking them. It's like trying to follow a map when old roads vanish and new ones are being built.
All languages have changing rules
What about PDP11 Assembly Language?
Funny how often these articles come from the country that brought "sox", "labor", "dialog" and "liter" to the English-speaking world. ;-)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
As a coda to my post, consider this howler:
World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling
This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.
It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.
I imagine that you think Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all different languages...But in the end, it's all just spelling the spelling, as they're all mutually intelligible.
Which is pretty much the same state of affairs with English and American although there are quite a few words which are completely different: lift vs. elevator, car bonnet vs. car hood, courgette vs. zucchini, aubergine vs. egg plant, car boot vs. car trunk etc. and more confusing an English word can have a different meaning in American and vice versa often to embarrassing effect e.g. rubber, pants, suspenders, chips, fanny etc.
This is why it is helpful to give the two 'languages' different names: they may be mutually intelligible (for the most part) but it can be helpful to know whether the language is English or American so that words like 'chips' with different meanings can be correctly interpreted. Calling it 'English English' and 'American English' is just redundant and it typically gets shortened to just English and then you are left guessing based on spellings or context what is meant.
Just try to listen to a 200 years old English recording, you wouldn't understand it. Languages evolve, and in a few 10's of years no American will understand the current British English.
10 years... They already have to subtitle most English accents on TV... And I mean a Londoner, not someone from Blackpool or Yorkshire.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
No matter how good the accent is, injecting the word "actually" several times in a sentence marks the speaker as an Indian.
Mind, you can identify a native New Yorker the same way, by the references to coitus and oedipal desires.
The problem with "bad English" is that it tends to be imprecise and ambiguous. Using a word "wrongly" might not be bad when talking to friends, but when placing a large order or designing an airplane, precise use of the language can really make a difference.
I could care less.
The problem is a popular culture that celebrates stupidity. If you want to break grammatical rules, either do so after reading Strunk & White and learning how to write properly. Then it's an artistic decision. Or you can learn English from lolcats and rappers, in which case you are just flaunting ignorance. I remember a drawing anatomy teacher who bemoaned a young artist's work. He had talent but never learned how to draw the human form. It is hard. However there's a difference, even if you paint abstract. There may be talented and educated rappers, but just because you can text and rhyme doesn't make you a poet or a journalist.
Linguistics has two branches. One branch is descriptive linguistics which studies how language is used. The other is proscriptive, who describes how a language should be used. This divide is covered pretty often by language log (worth reading pretty often).
This article is just someone discovering descriptive linguistics for the first time and ecstatic that their prejudgments are backed up by a branch of something that sounds like a science. Congratulations. "Science" has "proved" that there are no standards for language and all those teachers that marked up your papers with red pens were just being mean.
There is no One True English, but there sure as hell is a Don't Sound Like a Moron English. Like it or not, people hear more than just what you say. They also hear how you say it, and they tend to figure out who you are, or at least, who you are similar to.
Same goes with clothes. People know who you are just by looking at you. They may be wrong occasionally, and you can feel smug for subverting their expectations, but it is a tool that is right most of the time, and it seems to be wired very deeply into us, so no one is going to stop doing it.
You can whine all you want about how unfair it is, but if you want your ideas heard, your best bet is to sound (and look) like someone worth listening to.
See that "Preview" button?
Yes, but the ultimate goal is communication, and to that end some change is useful, some is harmful - and almost any change will have the effect of making older texts less readable.
Think of descriptivists as scientists and prescriptivists as engineers (albeit, it must be said, not always very good ones). I think there is a role for both.
Also, take note of one of the rare times "looser" is actually used appropriately. Nowadays, my brain makes a nearly audible 'tic' whenever it first spots that word anywhere on the internet, probably because of the tiny mental trauma inflicted on me each time someone misspells "loser".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Postel's Law.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
For understandability amongst illiterate Marxists, also known as Slashdotters, shouldn't that be "loser than"?
"Loser then", if I'm not mistaken.
Not sure it's confined entirely to us 'illiterate Marxist Slashdotters' though. =)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
This is a silly blanket statement. It's true of some things, such as the split infinitive. Other things, such as correct comma placement, play an obvious role in understanding a sentence. I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution. Text speak is just lazy.
soylentnews.org
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Sure, we all laughed at "all your base are belong to us", but there's a difference between chuckling at some examples of Engrish versus some sort of language snobbery. I suppose the Japanese or Chinese version of those sorts of jokes are when Westerners get kanji tattoos that don't quite mean what they thought. I think it's fine as long as it doesn't get mean-spirited or personal.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Losen up. Your begging the question.
Surely, if we want to define a Proper English, it should be English English[0], all 287 dialects of it http://sounds.bl.uk/accents-and-dialects/survey-of-english-dialects
English has always been a bastardised language, an amalgam of tribal languages specifically chosen to baffle the foreigner (read French courts of the middle ages) and then augmented with every interesting word in every language spoken in every port the Navy got to.
It's flexibility and adaptability is the foundation of it's strength, expecting it to remain static is just crazy.
[0] Yes this is a troll for all you usian mods.
foo
Let's hope that their friends aren't so mean as to stagmatize them!
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Um, that is the nature of mapmaking, reflecting the changing landscape due to, say, old roads being bulldozed and new roads being built. At a faster rate than linguistic change, I might add.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
This is the same for any living language. However I think that the rules stay similar over a very long time.Words might change, but gramar stays largely the same.
Only when you start to look closer will you find difference. Not only over time, but also per region. These differnces will influence each other or not. e.g. with Dutch and Afrikaans, there is now a clear difference. When looking at Dutch and Flemish, you will notice that the difference is much smaller and mainly pronounciation and worduse.
No matter how much (some) liguists would like to treat language as a fixed thing, it isn't.
You can't determine speed and location at the same time and that is what they are trying to mdo.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Nowadays, it's very likely someone using somewhat broken English on the internet simply doesn't speak it as a primary language. The way I figure it, I'm pretty sure their command of my language is a heck of a lot more impressive than my command of theirs. If I'm conversing with someone and they apologize for their poor English, I'll often pull out this quip to reassure them that not everyone is so shallow as to nitpick about stuff like that.
Oh bugger off. I can see from a mile whether some unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American or by someone who is learning the language. Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
However, since there are indeed many people on the internet whose first language isn't English, you should realize that using improper English makes it a lot harder for these people to understand you, and in the worst case they learn improper English from you. So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme.
Sounds like flawed assumptions. You can have very proper English that makes you think harder than the equivalent in slang. That's why txting is so popular, because it's easier to understand. But an oldster might be at a loss.
A few comments make incorrect presumptions. First, Oliver Kamm, author of the WSJ essay, is British, and pretty solidly so as he write leaders for The Times. Second, he is a former prescriptivist who has seen the error of his ways, and has not just recently become anti-prescriptivist. Third, most of the arguments put here in favour of prescriptivism are demolished in his recent book "Accidence will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage" which I commend not only for its arguments, but also for its guide to usage. I have reviewed it in detail here. There I also suggest one reason for prescriptivism which no one has yet mentioned - the Mother Tongue and old, battered teddy bears. Enjoy!
Its a mute point. Your begging the question, "Y"?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Oh bugger off.
unreadable rubbish is produced by a lazy, uneducated American
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
So being lazy and using improper English is impolite to the extreme
I see... It's impolite, is it? I'll certainly keep that in mind. We wouldn't want to be impolite now, would we?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.
Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
It made me try much harder with spelling, and rely less on automatic spelling corrections, and also gave me a new insight into the Bible!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides.
This is particularly true for spoken English vs written English. In spoken English, intonation and body language contribute to communication, eg bad vs bad. You're expected to fill in missing/garbled words from context. Written English is an attempt to encode all of that information.
So, sure, sloppy spelling, poor grammar, and homophone substitution may be understandable to your close friends. That makes it more of a code language or private language, and there's plenty of times where we like to share private, insider conversations. If you actually want to communicate with everyone, you have to use the parent language - step back from the Southern drawl or the Scots brogue and speak Common.
You're missing my point. Anyone who's aspiring to a career in, say, banking is pretty likely to make an effort to learn some form of "standard" English. But this is really about trying to control the language spoken by people who could not give two shits about a career in banking, because they are living very different lives in which such an aspiration is not only absurd but potentially dangerously distracting too.
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet. For instance "between you and I" is the result of some mistaken political correctness, that you can never say "and me". It's horrible, it's ungrammatical and it must stop now. "Then/than" and "your/you're" problems aren't confined to non-natives either. PS: I am not a native speaker of English
-- Make America hate again!
This is really an argument about values, isn't it? Quite a lot of people want "others" (and as your post implies by referring to ebonics, the other here is typically young black people) to value what they value -- a good job in academia or business. And want them to *de*-value, literally, the form of English they have grown up using, and see it as worthless to "getting ahead". This, despite the pretty obvious fact that if you used what you describe as "formal English" in the context in which many people live, it would be detrimental to your interests, just as using ebonics would be detrimental to your interests if used in a merchant bank. It's really about an underlying desire to not want alternative value systems to evolve, in which getting ahead may mean something other than getting a good job at a corporate or institution.
As the guy doing the hiring, you had fucking better share my "values" or at least be able to fake it.
It is my experience that those that don't want to speak reasonably correct English do so on purpose, and do to set themselves apart into a different (lower) class deliberately. Those speeking Thugeese and Dinduese do so as a way of fitting in with their group. I am more inclined to let the strategy work as I am never going to want to be around someone who's main negotiating ability is over who gets to sell crack on what corner.
Speak however you want. No loss, it makes it easier to pick out the gems from the garbage.
...that decided many, many perfectly good words needed respelling anyway.
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a set of opinions, not a set of rules. All the difference in the world. I can point you at numerous books and experts on grammar and writing that disagree with significant portions of that overused book.
It's a bit of a conflict of interest for a writer to say there are "no rules", when in fact there are.
There is no single authoritative set of rules for the English language. There are rules in the sense that there are commonly agreed to informal "standards" which persist for a time based on culture and comprehensibility but it is quite correct to say that that there aren't any rules in the sense of rules laid down by an authoritative body.
Fads come and go, while the underlying rules persist, generation after generation.
Quite simply not true. You merely have to go back far enough in time to get to a point where the language is no longer the same. Old English is for all practical purposes a completely different language than our modern version of English.
If that were not true, you would not be able to make sense of Shakespeare today.
Perhaps you haven't actually studied Shakespeare. Significant portions of his writing are quite inscrutable today without an explanation of the context, temporal usage and intent. That said, Shakespeare isn't so far removed from us that it is impossible to read - it's just a few hundred years and languages usually don't evolve that quickly. Go read Beowulf in the original Old English and tell me again that the rules of the language never change over time.
In technology you have an RFC published by a body whose authority supported by consensus. Then when you implement that technology, you can choose to be as compliant with RFC as you want. English teachers tend to see things as right vs. wrong, while in technology it's compliant vs. noncompliant, strict vs. loose/flexible. Loose compliance is often beneficial - how many people you know actually type the trailing dot on all of their FQDN's (e.g. http://slashdot.org./story)? The RFC says you're supposed to, but people rarely except when editing DNS records. Do we say that everyone is "wrong", or just noncompliant with RFC?
I find the technology model far less judgmental.
I know this is how language scholars in my country think as well, but it's idiotic. This approach is what warps language and creates misunderstandings, when you can no longer determine from spelling or pronounciation the etymology of a word. Artists also shouldn't adopt misheard lyrics as the correct way to perform their songs. Although that might be slightly interesting.
Picking the lowest common denominator is just plain sad when it comes to language.
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones.
Interestingly, in the USA the dialect of English spoken in the rural Appalachians is often claimed to be the closest thing you will find to Elizabethan English in the modern world. It is simultaneously probably the single least prestigious dialect of English in North America.
(Note: "Prestige" is how linguists talk about dialects being perceived as wrong or bad by other speakers. IOW: Most people will tell you someone speaking this dialect has "bad English". Irony.)
It's not a programmer thing; just look at the comments to the Wall Street Journal article and you'll find the same complaints. I find that pedantry is mostly a class issue. The educated upper classes (and those who see themselves as such) use pedantry to place themselves above others they view as lower class and uneducated ("begging the question" being a perfect example). You will never hear complaints about Bostonians who don't pronounce "r" (*Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd."); you will hear endless complaints about black people who say "ax" instead of "ask" (even though "ax" is actually the original pronunciation). The Boston accent is perceived as cosmopolitan and part of a historic American tradition. African-American vernacular is saddled with poverty and ghetto stereotypes by those outside the communities.
By definition, "improper" English is how poor people speak.
Here are a few words from a posh Brit on the matter.
That's not entirely true. Several of us where I work poked fun at a Bostonian coworker's references to his "cah".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
But that's the point. It's the linguistic equivalent of relative morality. If there not a single morality, then there is no morality. If there are no fixed and unchanging rules, then there may as well be no rules. A common frame of reference is required.
How would a physics work if the rules of physics changed at the whim of the physicist? How could programmers work if they were able to change the syntax on a whim? When they do, they call it a new language.
If you don't follow the rules, then you can't order chicken or fish
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh bugger off.
Tisk tisk. Cannot end a sentence with a preposition
Oh bugger off, jerk. There, FTFY.
From the z in apologize I'd think we're dealing with an American troll.
Your's,
The Grammar Nasi
Don't believe them. They don't write proper English.
Garry Knight
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think non-native English users make all sorts of errors, while native speakers make the constistent errors that are all over the internet.
The errors that people for whom English is a second language mage cannot properly be characterized as 'all over'; they are almost invariably errors that result from adults, who lack the flexibility to learn new languages readily, running past the end of their knowledge of English and by reflex applying the grammar and lexicon rules of their own language to English. Where there have been populations that spoke another language that became integrated into the English-speaking population -- the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Vikings, among others -- aspects of grammar from their own languages got absorbed into English, cases where English grammar were overly complicated got elided. For example, Celtic languages have a 'meaningless do' -- where, in other Germanic languages you would say 'saw you him today?', in Welsh it would be 'did you see him today?'; similarly, nouns lost the forest of cases, genders, and plurals that other Germanic languages retained. And this ignores the vocabulary changes from words the speakers of other languages brought; for example, the perfectly good 'ingang' has long since been buried by the Norman French 'entrance', while other Anglo-Saxonisms got relegated to a 'lower-class' status by French and Latinate words by association with the social class that used them -- 'ask', 'question', and 'interrogate', for example, or 'quick' vs. 'rapid', 'look' vs. 'regard', 'daze' vs. 'stupefy', 'room' vs. 'chamber', 'learning' vs. 'erudition'.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll