Re: Bostonites. *ZAP*

Brian Betty wrote:

>  Example: I once heard someone say
> "misusification" seriously in an attempt to make himself look intelligent.
> That doesn't make you twitch?
Sure it does.  But how can you tell what his motives are? Surely, you'd
have to know him pretty well to be able to say, for sure, that someone is
just trying to be pretensious. Even then, I don't think you could ever be
truly sure about it. And are all uses of the word, without exception, "wrong"
and therefore "ignorant"? I could easily imagine using such a word,
as when _The Onion_ did a parody on Don King's numerous linguistic
foibles.

> "Language has very little, if anything, to do with the "standards" set down
> in style manuals and the like--it's a living system, and can only be
> declared "wrong" in terms of a set of completely arbitrary rules. What's
> the point?]"
>
> The rules enable us to understand each other. To stupidly make grammatical
> errors while trying to make yourself look smart by talking like a Big Man
> makes me really, really mad - it's so bloody stupid. It's not logical, I
> guess, but neither are people.
This kinda begs the question, though.  How do you know what a
"grammatical error" is?  Can you point to any objective measure of
such a thing?  The past tense of "help" used to be "holp": are we
all now speaking "ungrammatically"?

Here's a question for you:  is "to stupidly make grammatical
errors"  ungrammatical to you? Isn't that a classic case of
"splitting infinitives"?

Where do such rules come from?  Some guy writing a grammar
book in Southern England several hundred years ago, that's where.
Certainly not from a survey of the linguistic habits of all English
speakers.