Telegraph - Dot Wordsworth on grammar This link is particularly relevant for Middlesex students taking 'Attitudes to English Language' just now, where we look at descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language, and have also discussed Carter & McCarthy a bit. Some of the points Dot makes about the effects of particular kinds of communication seem reasonable to me, but she makes some mistakes (e.g. thinking anyone would argue against correcting spelling mistakes or that there is much opposition these days to teaching Standard English). It would be good to get all of this sorted out a bit more explicitly as I think a lot of people who think they disagree about grammar actually agree about an awful lot. I don't see a problem with saying you're a descriptive linguist while still having opinions about usages you don't like. I do think it's time people like Dot (and me, actually) just accepted that the meaning of 'beg the question' has changed. It jars slightly with me, but I hardly ever hear it used in the old sense these days. I like the bit she quotes from Carter and McCarthy (people love to find dodgy usage by people writing on language):
'But never before have we experienced as creative a phase in language as we are now in our age of modern media'
It's definitely clumsy style, but I'm not sure whether it's technically 'wrong'. I think it becomes much better if you add 'experiencing' between 'now' and 'in' (although I'd still rephrase it myself).
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