Agnes Beatrix Wrote:
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> So now basically it is undecided which "standard
> and sensible" rule is the actual ruel of correct
> grammar. If we take this concept to the extreme it
> follows that there are no rules of grammar after
> all, just to follow what other people are saying.
Think about who you are trying to talk to/write for, and try to avoid what will make them squirm or shudder unnecessarily. Other than that, your rule is a pretty good one.
At bottom, the rules of grammar (and everything else that constitutes language) are habits, or customs, established by consistent usage and shared by a population of speakers. With a population as complex as the world-wide population of English speakers over the centuries, you obviously wind up with rather different shared sets of habits among different sub-populations.
The evaluation of some sets as “correct” and others as “incorrect” depends, of course, on who gets to evaluate —generally to decide their group is correct and the others incorrect. It is in the end a matter of (groan) politics. (An old definition has it that a language is a dialect with its own army and navy.) I think we have been fortunate in English to not have a King or an Academie to pontificate infallibility on the matter of right and wrong in our usage of language. The language has been enriched by accepting quite a lot of variation.
It doesn’t mean that all variants are neutral. Some might be seen as inflicting damage on the language itself and are unfortunate in that way, e.g. those that decrease the precision or expressive potential of the language. One example relevant to the discussion in this thread: for a lot of people comparative connectors like like or better than are now treated like prepositions such as after or on top of; the pronoun following them is consistently in the object-case. They say better than me and not better than I. The older way (my own pedantic native tongue) used both, and thereby allowed beautiful and economic expression of certain differences. She likes you better than I is very different from She likes you better than me; the first can be paraphrased as she likes you better than I do and the other as she likes you better than she likes me. The newer habit (standard and sensible enough for most nowadays) has abandoned the possibility of this useful contrast.
But it’s not that big a deal; you can still say the longer sentences to make yourself clear.
Another kind of non-neutral change is not so much a sin against the language as a sin against language-independent (?) good taste. (The two kinds grade into each other, actually.) I find the “crassification of language”, as exemplified in the needless incursion of four-letter words into so much modern speech and writing, to be somewhere between distasteful and morally objectionable. I can at least combat it by trying to avoid it in my own usage. And yet I must admit that there are contexts (enhanced by the avoidance elsewhere) in which a well-placed s-word or even f-word can enhance the communication of a worthwhile message.
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> So now basically it is undecided which "standard
> and sensible" rule is the actual ruel of correct
> grammar. If we take this concept to the extreme it
> follows that there are no rules of grammar after
> all, just to follow what other people are saying.
Think about who you are trying to talk to/write for, and try to avoid what will make them squirm or shudder unnecessarily. Other than that, your rule is a pretty good one.
At bottom, the rules of grammar (and everything else that constitutes language) are habits, or customs, established by consistent usage and shared by a population of speakers. With a population as complex as the world-wide population of English speakers over the centuries, you obviously wind up with rather different shared sets of habits among different sub-populations.
The evaluation of some sets as “correct” and others as “incorrect” depends, of course, on who gets to evaluate —generally to decide their group is correct and the others incorrect. It is in the end a matter of (groan) politics. (An old definition has it that a language is a dialect with its own army and navy.) I think we have been fortunate in English to not have a King or an Academie to pontificate infallibility on the matter of right and wrong in our usage of language. The language has been enriched by accepting quite a lot of variation.
It doesn’t mean that all variants are neutral. Some might be seen as inflicting damage on the language itself and are unfortunate in that way, e.g. those that decrease the precision or expressive potential of the language. One example relevant to the discussion in this thread: for a lot of people comparative connectors like like or better than are now treated like prepositions such as after or on top of; the pronoun following them is consistently in the object-case. They say better than me and not better than I. The older way (my own pedantic native tongue) used both, and thereby allowed beautiful and economic expression of certain differences. She likes you better than I is very different from She likes you better than me; the first can be paraphrased as she likes you better than I do and the other as she likes you better than she likes me. The newer habit (standard and sensible enough for most nowadays) has abandoned the possibility of this useful contrast.
But it’s not that big a deal; you can still say the longer sentences to make yourself clear.
Another kind of non-neutral change is not so much a sin against the language as a sin against language-independent (?) good taste. (The two kinds grade into each other, actually.) I find the “crassification of language”, as exemplified in the needless incursion of four-letter words into so much modern speech and writing, to be somewhere between distasteful and morally objectionable. I can at least combat it by trying to avoid it in my own usage. And yet I must admit that there are contexts (enhanced by the avoidance elsewhere) in which a well-placed s-word or even f-word can enhance the communication of a worthwhile message.