Cacti instead of cactuses? To me, that makes no more sense than saying Hamburger instead of hamburgers or bazaarhaa instead of bazaars.
I find it interesting that the US, with one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world of acceptance of the theory of evolution through random mutation and natural selection, should be one of the most devoted to the social Darwinism of capitalism.
I see no reason to "correct" the grammar of a native speaker of a language. If native speakers can easily understand each other's dialects, neither needs to adopt the rules of the other's.
I was thinking that if a native speaker of a language is unsure about how they would express themself in their language or if they have the idea that non-native speakers speak their (the native's) language better than them, then they must have been subjected to some pretty serious psychological abuse with respect to the use of their native tongue.
I'll consider using "a whole other" instead of "a whole nother" when prescriptivists call fruits from Citrus ×sinensis trees "noranges" instead of "oranges."
The fact that someone holds certain values stubbornly does not make them absolute definitions of right and wrong.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Aphorisms 3 through 8
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Life imitates Monty Python
Geoff Pullum, one of my professors from when I was in grad school in linguistics, posted a blog entry over at Language Log talking about how some high schools in the UK seem to be having their students who are native speakers of a non-English language take the proficiency exam for their native language in order to pad the high schools' average scores for GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exam scores.
I won't take a position here on the ethics of the practice, but I was reminded of this sketch from Monty Python's flying circus. Note, however, that no-one is claiming that the high schools are having native French speakers (for example) take classes where they endure constructing sentences on the pattern of la plume de ma tante ...
(modify appropriately for other languages).
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