But that does not prevent me from wishing that others enjoy their holiday celebrations, as I enjoy my retirement.
Language does indeed change. But I'll continue to be an old fuddy duddy and get upset when people write "your" when they mean "you're", and vice versa, and I'll continue to advocate for proofreading in self-published books.
In other areas, I argue for faster change: As each generation is too confounded lazy to learn the metric system, they condemn each successive generation to living with the stupidity of the imperial system.
It seems as though languages evolve towards simpler and simpler grammar, and with that simplicity comes a loss of expressive potential. Example: English-speakers learning Spanish excoriate the subjunctive mood because it's difficult for them to master because at some time in the past, uneducated, lazy, and stupid English-speakers dropped it and it slipped out of our language. But if you do study Spanish, and manage to learn the subjunctive (which is just a matter of overcoming your laziness -- anyone can learn it) you find that it is massively useful for communicating a certain kind of concept: actions or qualities that are unreal or hypothetical. My point is that the simplification of grammar that happens as people are too lazy to learn the proper use of their own language, diminishes our ability to communicate.
People used to learn spelling. Now they rely on spell-checkers, which only flag a word if it is not in the dictionary. They let it pass if it is the wrong word. Change is inevitable. But laziness leads inevitably to a reduction in the quality of communication. I suspect that Dale skips the proofreading in order to be able to write more books. Speaking for myself, I'd happily pay double so that he could hire an editor.Statistics: Posted by daniel1948 — Wed Jan 01, 2014 7:54 pm
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