So this kid I know from college*, Alex W., is a linguistics-person, and he linked a while back to the esoteric and quite academic blog Language Log. Anyway, on an old episode of Fresh Air (from February 23rd? I think?) that I just listened to, they talked about this guy, Arnold Zwicky, who I’m pretty sure has worked on that blog. Zwicky’s a linguist, and they talked about what he calls “Zombie Rules” (Zombie Rules) — rules that we continue to impose on the English language, even though frankly they’re outdated. Somewhere in there, they mentioned Jan Freeman’s column in the Globe, which I rather enjoy; she writes about grammar and usage with a particularly liberal hand, I think.
I have long been into this sort of layman’s linguistics, wherein I don’t really need to understand the IPA or scholarly study, but can still enjoy etymology or grammar or learning new terms. I have mixed feelings about the debate between prescription (“this is how you do language”) and description (“this is how other people are doing language”), which seems pretty reasonable — I lean towards “if it works, then go for it” but generally am strongly opposed to misspellings or all number of weird grammar constructions. Which of course is ridiculous because I love fucking with my own grammar. I guess my point is just that even when something is wrong, it’s generally understood. When my older students were in London a few weeks ago, apparently two of them bargained for a sweatshirt by asking the vendor, *”More cheap?” That’s shitty grammar, and it’s wrong. (Obviously, it should be “cheaper,” or I suppose an actual sentence might be nice.) But it worked, didn’t it? They somehow came out of it with a sweatshirt for like 7 GBP. I think my conclusion is just that in this, as so often occurs, there is no clear solution.
* It feels weird to say “college.” I’ve trained myself to say “university” generally, here, because it makes more sense to people. (For one thing, colegio is primary school in Spanish; for another, in some non-US countries including the UK “college” means a private secondary school.) But you all understand.