Manny seems to be responding to this post: Get your nose out of the dickshunary nerd Posted by Tyred on 2024-May-25 08:21:34, Saturday https://boychat.org/messages/1627870.htm In that post tpka "Tyred" said: "The real life meaning of words is defined by how the words are used in everyday language, not by authoritarian linguistic prescriptivist writing books/websites up in their ivory towers." It's funny to see the lengths Manny goes to pretend that he doesn't click on or read tpka "Tyred's" posts. Rather than just have an open honest discussion about the issues, he makes a new thread pretending to have just thought of the topic and pretends to have independently came up with the inspiration to start a discussion on it. But anyway, the fact is that language changes over time. "They" (ordinary users of the English language) are the ones who define what words "really mean" by using the words in ordinary, every day context. You can never go back to what words really mean, unless you are talking about a dead language that has stopped evolving. "Language change is not "corruption" or "decay", but a natural and inevitable process. Attempts to stop it lead to diglossia, a situation in which formal and ordinary language get further and further apart, and eventually split into two different languages. You can preserve the elite language for a long time (there are still speakers of Sanskrit in modern India), but you can't stop the process. These facts don't tell us what values to have. We might decide that it would be a good thing for a particular variety of English -- say the English of Jane Austen, or the English of Theodore White -- to become an unchanging language of formal discourse for the elite, like Latin in Medieval Europe, with the language(s) of daily life despised as "vulgar tongues." We might decide to prefer the existing gradual process of change in formal English, in which one "standard" after another is defended and then abandoned. We might even prefer the linguistic anarchy of Elizabethan England, where people spoke, wrote (and spelled) English as they pleased, although they applied strict formal guidelines to their Latin and Greek. The fact is, it probably doesn't matter much what we want. The English language is likely to go on in the future roughly as it has over the past few hundred years, with a wide range of regional and social varieties, and a more-or-less international formal standard, imposed by consensus and changing gradually over time. [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst] |