[NTLK] [OT} Re: 20 MB memory cards FAQ

[Andrei Chichak]

Oooh, English grammar.

My son has been in French Immersion for about 12 years now, and I got to help him with English grammar. We figured out that, in English, there was about one special rule per sentence.

A lot of the people that I have talked to over the years have poo-pood French as being a "dead language" since they, apparently, have the language police dictating what is and isn't correct. English, on the other hand, was a vigorous, living, language because it is based on usage. 

Doesn't definition by usage lead to "ain't", "irregardless", and floobydop being immediately acceptable (since I just used it, right there, see)? How can anything be misspelled? "But Ms. Smith, it's written down, therefore, according to usage, it's correct".

I can get behind things like "it's/its", the trailing ' possessive on a name ending in s, I can even accept "I" begin capitalized whereas "we" isn't because some typographer decided that "i" looked dumb, and I think that "quotes should not have punctuation within the marks"! 

But ain't and irregardless are just stupid. And what is up with twenty, thirty, "forty"? Shouldn't it be "fourty"?

End of rant, no more to see here.

Andrei