FAULTY
REASONING FAULTY
REASONING
Are you as tired as I am of hearing people try to excuse their own bad grammar by saying, “Well, we don’t still speak Shakespearean English?” How does one respond to a non sequitir like that?? One thing has nothing whatsoever to do with the other! Modern English has grammar rules. Shakespearean English had its grammatical rules. In each case, right is right, and wrong is wrong. Frankly, I would much rather hear people speak Shakespearean English, than hear a lot of the drivel that today passes for “language.” At least it had the virtue of sounding beautiful and charming, whereas most of what passes for today’s speech will certainly never be accused of that.
Then they point to the inclusion
of inaccuracies into the dictionary as if we grammarians were to blame for it,
should have to make excuses for it, and should be, I suppose, somehow punished
for it. I was only tiny at the time, but I remember how enraged my late father
was at the sudden inclusion of “ain’t” into the dictionary. Actually, its
inclusion provoked quite a fury at the time, and not just on my home-front. The
excuse given by the irresponsible decision-makers was that, while they readily
admitted that it was wrong, they were including it because foreigners and the
uneducated needed a way to look up what they were hearing, whether or not what
they heard was proper English; and they further promised that the non-word would
always have a disclaimer acknowledging its status as incorrect usage. Despite
that explanation and reservation, the undereducated still smugly stood waiting
for us grammar-sticklers to admit our defeat. I, for one, will do no such thing.
I still say, as I have always said, that if fifty-thousand
people believe in a dumb idea, it is still a dumb idea: popularity does not make it
so.
