User talk:Patronanejo/sandbox

Ahem... "...lays claim from the offset that the Queen’s English..." ...I believe you mean outset.

While I agree with your sentiments regarding Lamb's pompous, underinformed, and unmerited elitism, I have to confess I am decidedly prejudiced against the sort of solecism exemplified above.

I'm afraid Bernard C. Lamb's footballer is categorically in error; by invoking the term literally, he indicates that he is no longer speaking metaphorically. I agree there is nothing unclear about his intent--just as I understand what you mean by offset--but there is nothing polysemous about either usage.

If effective use of language is to be measured solely by whether one gets another's message, we could dispense with grammar and syntax altogether; I imagine most of our ideas could be communicated with a nod, a grunt, and an index finger. Lamb's point is that rather less solipsistic standards--honed by centuries of usage--exist, and that widespread observation of them is the only comprehensive means of communication between cultures that may not share one another's non-spoken cues. In descriptivist terms, verbal communication is entirely dependent upon idiolectical commonalities.

To me, Lamb's failure to acknowledge the essential dynamism of language is less offensive than--for example--the increasing frequency with which I see the subject pronoun I being used in circumstances that call for the object pronoun me (e.g., Dale took Kyle, Ryan, and I to the racetrack). I know what the speaker means, but the louder message is that the speaker is too stupid to realise he is making himself sound even dumber.

If you believe so insipid a construction could never threaten to enter standard usage, think again. Until recently, similar objections were commonly raised against the use of they as a genderless third-person pronoun. That battle seems very nearly over--and is exactly the sort of slippery slope Lamb most fears.

Such fears are, of course, no excuse for Lamb's insistence that the conventions of English language be frozen, having reached their apogee at some point between the First-and Second World Wars. The notion that ignorance engenders every deviation from RP is tantamount to sociopathy. As useless a bunch as QES may be, I agree with Lamb that a mistake is a mistake--no matter how prevalent it becomes: • The possessive form its does not take an apostrophe. • I can never be the object of a preposition--no matter how many others join me. • Latter and former do not apply to pools of more than two. • They and their are plural. • There is no such thing as ice tea--it's iced tea.

I support any effort to identify- and obviate such catastrophic solecisms. I'll split an infinitive whenever I damn well please, though.