It is exceedingly common to find academic linguists who pour scorn on teachers' attempts to correct students who confuse words, saying that it is pedantic to try and stem the inevitable onrush of language change. For example, they have in their sights anyone who would point out to their students the semantic difference between such pairs as 'refute' and 'deny', 'sensuous' and 'sensual', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'. Another pair is the transitive verb 'lay' and the intransitive 'lie' -- over here in England it used to be comparatively rare to hear someone say 'Lay on the bed' or I've been laying here half an hour', instead of 'Lie on the bed' or 'I've been lying here half an hour', but it is becoming increasingly common (I notice, for example, that Americans say 'the lay of the land' and not 'the lie of the land'). Some linguists, however, are straying from the scientific compound. A scientist should be examining the changes happening in the corpus of words, regardless of their causes. Even a sociolinguist, interested in those causes, does not take sides. It is not for the linguists to lay down rules about what should or should not be preserved. If educators in some society find that it aids community feeling to inculcate a 'standard' speech and are concerned to produce the results they intend, that is just one of the historical factors that a linguist would have to acknowledge, not a feature that he or she should be condemning out of hand as 'pedantic'. They have a tendency to move from a statement like 'Change in language is a normal process' (David Crystal, 'How Language Works, 2006, p. 483) which is undeniable, to 'Educational resistance to particular changes is futile', for it might be perfectly 'normal' in a society to resist such changes. They say that one should not be using a word such as 'decay' of a language: no, not at the level of scientific inquiry, but yes, if one considers that, say, the distinction between 'refute' and 'deny' is valuable. The continual use of 'refute' (which means to set out a would-be conclusive, carefully argued disproof of something) for 'deny' (which is merely to contradict something someone has said) might lead to a double loss -- the simultaneous disappearance of the useful word 'deny' and of the meaning of 'refute', for which there is no adequate synonym. Confusion of the two indicates someone who can have had no training of any kind in the rhetoric of argument, surely a necessity in a democracy. Would it not be an instance of decay if that should come about? I detect a neo-romantic ideology at work here: its dream is of a childhood innocence as a delicate fruit the bloom of which must not be touched. There is also a mistaken class element that reads the attempt to teach standard English as elitist, interfering with the natural dialects of the working-class. I have found many students of working-class background who readily outstrip their middle-class schoolfellows in learning about language, and end up being able to move from dialect to Standard English and back again without any loss of local colour in their pronunciation. Among their peers, of course, there are many who obstinately distort their speech to signal conformity with and loyalty to 'us' rather than 'them'. Is that determination to be blessed as irresistible because it is 'normal'? Edmond Wright To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/