At my sister's this week I dipped into The Lynne Truss Book*.
I confess I learned a lot and found it well written and entertaining. Is this the beginning of the end for me?
*For it shall bring bad luck upon those who utter its full name.
I also have David Crystal's reply to That Book, which deliberately has an almost identical appearance.
The thing drummed into us as linguists was always to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and that "all texts are of equal value"
Bollocks. While there is indeed great scope in language development in moving on, with such variants of English as Aussie and Singlish, the primary function of language is communication. If there are no rules, we end up with potential ambiguity or incomprehension, such as in the temporally/temporarily dichotomy mentioned above. There is a fundamental difference between a child who writes an essay in txtspk because they are having fun, and one who writes in txtspk because that is all they know. Linguistic change is not the same thing as ignorance or laziness, and those who rant on about "grammer Natzis" fail to see a point that has been stressed many times here: if you turn up for a job dressed like a scruff, the message you are sending is not one of willingness to make an effort. If you are too lazy to check your grammar and spelling (typos happen; such is life) your message gets lost in the white noise of semiliteracy.
We are now,as I have mentioned before, in a world where a GCSE A* in French is awarded to someone who cannot conjugate the verb "to be" in the present tense.
