Dick,

I totally agree with your  response to Charrow. I am amazed that as a
linguist, she has such a simplistic view of this.

In addition to your points, I am thinking of how much more writing and
speaking we are exposed to in the media. Even if there were fewer
"grammatical mistakes" (non-standard forms) in  past published writing and
public speaking (which I question), think of how small the pool of
contributors was then compared to now. Also, the contributors were often
wealthier and with more formal education etc.
--

Christine Reintjes Martin
[log in to unmask]




>From: "Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: From the Washington Times
>Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 23:45:34 -0500
>
>I would like to know when that wonderful time was when people didn't make
>grammatical errors, when Americans were routinely literate, when students
>could write fluently, when no one had problems with the who/whom
>distinction or used "criteria" as a singular noun. Folk wisdom says it was
>about a generation ago. Of course, that's what folk wisdom has always said.
>
>A generation ago (as folk wisdom would have it) the English language was
>just fine and people used it well. Today, however, the language is
>deteriorating, and people no longer speak or write it properly. That's a
>common complaint in 2004, and it's easy to find other similar complaints
>today--just as it was easy to find them in 1975, and in 1950, and in 1925,
>and in 1800 and 1600 and 1400. People seem always to have believed the
>language was on the decline and to have expressed that belief in almost
>identical terms ever since there has been an English language. Harvey
>Daniels did a nice job of presenting these complaints through the ages in
>his 1983 book Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered.
>The evident conclusion is that such fulminations have their origin in the
>human psyche far more than in objective reality.
>
>If our language were on a thousand year downward slope, we'd all be
>muttering gibberish by now. But just because past Jeremiahs were wrong,
>that doesn't prove that now isn't the one time in our history when our
>language really is falling apart. The odds are against this hypothesis,
>however, and before accepting it, we need to see objective evidence and not
>the glib anecdotes that Charrow presents.
>
>Dick Veit
>UNCW English Department
>
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