4 ms·
As a linguist, I can say resolutely that your prescriptivism is basically pounding your fists against the immovable brick wall of change. All types of case are
by languagehacker 16y ago
As a linguist, I can say resolutely that your prescriptivism is basically pounding your fists against the immovable brick wall of change. All types of case are rapidly disappearing from English. It's a continuing trend and has been for hundreds of years. The ambiguity generated is a trade-off people make for a variety of conveniences, let alone to fit in.
The subjunctive mood is basically gone from practiced speech, too. None of it is terribly worth lamenting.
In fact, changing it to "whom" would do nothing more than alienate its large-scale market, who aren't all leather elbow pads and Strunk & White, but rather real people who exercise language outside of the confines of a book report.
Sorry, dude. It's just not worth getting bent out of shape about.
- theycallmemorty 16y agoThere's a joke in there about language being dynamic and you referring to @VictoriaCohen (clearly female) as a 'dude'.
- jsharpe 16y ago"Dude" has been unisex for a while now. It would be almost offensive (not to mention dated) to call someone a "dudette".
- Hexstream 16y agoThe immovable brick wall of change? That doesn't sound right...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- boredguy8 16y agoI think that's the point. Good writing often doesn't make sense on a literal level. Apart from this, my favorite example from recently: "and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002." http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2010/08/luke-harangody-boston-and-gathering.html http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2010/08/luke-harangody-boston-...
- BrandonM 16y agoWithout Shaq's name in there, I had to read the article in order to understand the humor of the quote: the Celtics now have Shaq and Jermaine O'Neal and Kevin Garnett all on one team; in 2002 (when they were near their collective prime), that collection of big men would have been unstoppable.
- MattGrommes 16y agoYay! Thank you for saying that. All the armchair grammarians in Twitter-land tut-tutting over this has been bugging me but I couldn't put it as eloquently as you have. Nice job.
- mortenjorck 16y agoI suppose we could look at this from an external perspective and actually see some good: Deprecating the subjunctive makes English easier to learn for non-native speakers.
- waqf 16y agoAnd harder to parse unambiguously for everyone. Gee, thanks.
- junkbit 16y agoLet alone in which to fit. (j/k)