Language changes -- fight or go along?

[sr71plt]

Dictionaries can only retroactively describe language change which is already underway. Linguistically, the acceptability of language change is determined by usage, with dictionaries playing catch-up. That's one of the nice things about the linked article, how it demonstrates that certain style battles (could care less) have already been lost.

I specified what the U.S. publishing industry does--the one that will edit your work if you are published in the mainstream. Again, I think many writers cause themselves too much headache and throw too many cooks in the kitchen on this not just to accept what the industry is going to do with their work if they publish it.

Some writers want to spend too much of their time being high brow and wandering around in some literary forest about this. Why they can't simply take the simplification the industry gives them as a gift allowing them to concentrate more on their writing is beyond me.

Incidentally, although Webster's International/Collegiate comes out with numbered editions in long time delays, it actually updates with each new printing--every three or four months for the Collegiate, less often for the International.

 

[oggbashan]

There has been a report in the UK recently complaining that school leavers can no longer distinguish between street language and normal English.

It is irritating potential employers when job applicants cannot modify their language to customer appropriate speech.

When Og was young, it was normal to speak one way to your classmates, another way to adults and in a formal way to teachers and potential employers. You spoke according to the role you were assuming.

But the complaint now is that some school leavers have no idea of what is or not appropriate in formal situations.

That was possibly always true, but the proportion of those who cannot use formal language has increased.

 

[sr71plt]

There has been a report in the UK recently complaining that school leavers can no longer distinguish between street language and normal English.

It is irritating potential employers when job applicants cannot modify their language to customer appropriate speech.

When Og was young, it was normal to speak one way to your classmates, another way to adults and in a formal way to teachers and potential employers. You spoke according to the role you were assuming.

But the complaint now is that some school leavers have no idea of what is or not appropriate in formal situations.

That was possibly always true, but the proportion of those who cannot use formal language has increased.

Heard yesterday from a professor at a nearby university (VCU), that a dictum has come down that in order to counter the near illiteracy in being able to write among college students, now essays have to be assigned in all classes in all fields and the professors have to mark and grade on grammar, spelling, and punctuation as well as topic content. He was lamenting the impossibility of this in view of having 350 students in his classes.

I consoled him by saying that the dictum wouldn't last long--only until they realized that the professors didn't understand grammar, spelling, and punctuation either.