Re: OT: distinctions worth preserving

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

flash wrote:
> People learn a language by listening and reading. If what they read and
> hear is corrupt, they learn a corrupted language, all the while thinking
> it to be correct. That is how solecisms propagate and become established
> in common usage. And when distinctions are lost, loss of precision is
> not far behind.
Exactly. BUT for centuries, education implied that besides listening
and reading people had studied the formal structures of at least their
own language, and preferably (for contrast, comparison, and
clarification) one or more other languages. In my experience, except
for a few "backward" religious schools where some old nun or rabbi's
wife, sister, or aunt was still teaching grammar, English grammar
hasn't been taught in English-speaking countries for 50 years or more.
And I strongly suspect that more recently even "foreign" languages are
being taught--if at all--by some slapdash "immersion" method (real
immersion is another matter), with NO discussion of formal grammar at all.
I have tried to teach grammar to editors--science editors, no
less--only to be told, "Never mind all that theory. Just tell us 10
common errors and how to fix them."
> be "he died only last week"--otherwise a pedant might conclude that he
> did nothing else all last week but die (slowly)
Interestingly, the great usage guru H. W. Fowler, who was generally
strict to the point of being called a pedant by some, used just that
example, and characterized the party who was insisting on "died only
last week" as "one of those friends from whom the English language may
well pray to be saved, one of the modern precisians who have more zeal
than discretion, and wish to restrain liberty as such, regardless of
whether it is harmfully or harmlessly exercised."

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx