…If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be…
Fellow grammar god Bill Poser, over at the Language Log, takes issue with this paragraph:
…The author of this quiz probably has good intentions, but I’m afraid that my mission in life is not “to preserve the English tongue”. For one thing, it doesn’t need saving. English is spoken natively by hundreds of millions of people and as a second language my hundreds of millions more. I’ll devote my efforts to languages that are actually endangered, such as the native languages of British Columbia.
Of course, the author may be concerned with the preservation of the English language in another sense. He or she probably has the idea that to the extent that prescriptive rules are not followed, the language is somehow deteriorating…
But this is something that happens to dying languages, not languages like English that are growing. By any real measure of linguistic vitality or expressiveness, it makes not the slightest difference whether you use will or shall according to prescriptive rules or how you spell the possessive form of words ending in <s>. It is silly to think that English is in need of preservation because people don’t follow arbitrary rules.
He also comments on several other aspects. If you took the test, you should read the full article!
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