Ed, I read your interesting posting yesterday and decided to give it a day and then reread it. I'm trying to understand what has spurred your remarks so that I can get a better grasp on your argument. You make the point that English speakers are dropping such lexical contrasts and sensuous/sensual, etc. As a linguist I have to declare that I haven't read denunciations from my colleagues of teachers who insist on teaching these contrasts. Rather, much of it strikes me as an important part of vocabulary building, a task that goes on well beyond the BA. I would correct in the writing of my students many misusages of the sort you list. While it is a truism that language changes and there is little we can do about it, it also remains true that there is a variant of English, call it standard if you will, that we expect educated people to be able to read, write, and speak, at least in appropriate social contexts. I don't think all of these contrastive pairs have the same status. The "lie/lay" contrast is a contrast in transitivity. Since the transitive meaning ("lay") becomes clear as soon as the reader/hearer comes upon a direct object, the redundant marking of transitivity means that the distinction between lie/lay/lain(laid) and lay/laid/laid carries less functional load and so is at risk of the forces of language change. The fact that in Modern English the strong past participle "lain" has already been replaced by the weak past participle "laid" indicates that this change has been in progress for some time. In contrast, the difference between the adjectives "disinterested" and "uninterested" is not one that is redundantly marked in the structure of the sentence, and so I expect careful users of English to make the distinction when it needs to be made. I don't know of an academic linguist who ignores the conventions of Standard English in his or her own writing or in that of their students (and I used "their" intentionally, since it goes back about 400 years in this usage). You don't give a citation for your second quote below, "Educational resistance to particular changes is futile," so I'm not sure what the writer meant. Is "particular" used in a generic sense "any particular" or in a specific sense ("certain specified changes"). If the former, the writer is clearly wrong. My use of "his or her" above reflects a socially driven change in usage. Many of us continue to use "refute" and "deny" to express the relevant distinction without having overtly been taught it. Even though I recognize the inexorableness of language change, there are changes I resist and correct when I see them. I personally can't abide "hone in on" for "home in on", a usage that goes back only to the mid-20th c. I do take exception to your claim that language undergoes decay. I take decay to mean irreversible entropy. Signals undergo decay, as do all other physical objects. Words change, but when complexity is lost in one area of a language, complex normally increases in another. The history of English illustrates this nicely. Old English had a rich system of case endings, six cases, on nouns, adjectives, and determiners. That system virtually disappeared in Middle English because of normal, regular sound changes and some resulting analogical changes. One might say that case marking decayed during this period, but what actually happened is that the relationships and meanings marked by case endings in Old English came to be marked by word order and prepositions in Middle and Modern English. The complexity shifted from morphology to syntax and lexis. Languages have a necessary level of complexity since they are a product of the complexity of human cognition, but that complexity can show up in very different ways from language to language. The deny/refute distinction may well be one that colloquial usage doesn't generally need and so is not made. However, more formal English does find it necessary to make the distinction, and so learners are obligated to learn the distinction if they don't already know it. That's not so much a matter of language change or decay as of difference in register. I do agree with you rather strongly that Standard English has very strong social class implications, many of them deleterious to those who don't master that particular dialect. A huge part of our educational system is devoted to maintaining these class differences. I hope I haven't misread you. Herb 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/ 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/