LED flashlight instructions

[Mike O'Dell]

Oh my brothers......

I'm married to a PhD linguist and as a result,
spend time considerably outnumbered by them.
When they gather in groups it alternates between
entertaining and terrifying. Why just today I had
a conversation about the travesty the Unicode droids
are committing by attempting to include Cuniform symbols.
The fact that can spike someone's blood pressure 50 points
is amusing, but then it was also clear long ago that the
Unicode droids, while probably well-meaning, are actually
incompetent in the extreme. So what can you say?

The question of "what should a dictionary record"
and "what is the meaning of the phrase 'grammar rules'"
are topics which are not trivial nor do they have trivially
obvious answers.

It is necessary that dictionaries record actual usage
because if they don't nothing else does and there is 
no way to discover current usage nor track its evolution.
This does NOT imply that being listed in the OED is an "endorsement"
of any kind. Having gotten a number of words into the OED
myself, the process is interesting and certainly provides
for varying degrees of skepticism about both the provinance
and the commonality of particular usages.

one area fraught with difficulties is pronunciation. even in
the UK, dialects vary widely, and when other English-speaking
areas come into play, it's even worse. again, the lexicographers
that build the OED are forced to make some choices for the
sake of finite space and capturing certain concensus.

If you are particularly interested in American dialects and slang,
the "Dictionary of American Slang" is the best compendium of
US regional English, both usage, pronunciation, and some forms.

as for "grammar" - like a great many things, "grammar rules"
represent a consensus and it absolutely does shift over time.
English grammar suffered mightily at the hands of rabid Latin
teachers who attempted to force English into the mold of Latin
when English is a perfectly good GERMANIC language (middle English
and middle German are much more alike than they are different).
A good example is the stupid prohibition about "ending a sentence with a
preposition". Absolutely verboten in Latin, yes. If you examine the 
English forms where the urge to end with a preposition is strongest,
you'll find that the German verb is almost always one which sends
the prefix particle (which usually translates as a prepositional
phrase) to the end of the German sentence. That preposition wants
to be at the end of the sentence because it *isn't* really a
preposition, but actually a part of the verb which has gotten
disconnected from the main verb over time as the languages
drifted apart (and frustrated Latin teachers continued to
meddle). 

Languages are living things, just like, oh, physics. Even Newtonian
Physics fell from grace as The One True Model, and that was about
as perfect as perfection comes. Likewise, "grammar rules" do shift
over time, both because of morphological changes (what is easy
to describe as "sloppy use") but also because there are new thoughts
which need to be expressed and are not well-served by existing
strictures.

Consider my favorite new form: the fragment sequence. example:
	 Best. Grammatical. Hack. Ever.

by classical English grammar, those are fragments and are wRong.
However, this gets to the fundamental question of "What is written
language supposed to capture?" If you return to the general
considerations of the command and the period, the comma is 
said to denote a "short pause" while the period is a "full stop"
(or longer pause). So what the above fragment sequence is denoting
is the *rhetorical cadence* of the spoken form. It is absolutely
appropriate to want to capture such information in written English,
and whether you wish to quibble with the encoding chosen,
there was no pre-existing form to capture that information so
the originator was forced (ie, free) to create a new form.

one can also argue about the meta-grammatical question of whether
that form is necessary or desirable in discourse, but if that
is what someone wanted to say, then they get to say it.

The issue of ambiguity in English is a well-worn subject.
Many of the puns and linguistic flourishes which work in English
do not work in other, more highly-inflected languages because
the machinery of verb conjugation and noun declintion prevent
the common English hack of "verbing nouns" and "nouning verbs".
(For my money, those two abuses are most frequently commited
when there are perfectly good words available without doing it,
and that gets my hackles up *real good*.)

A much more egregious example is the horrific "First Seed",
implying the best of something. I vividly remember watching
this abomination come to pass when Tennis first made it onto
prime time television in the 70s. This is clearly a perversion
of "first chair" - as in an orchestra instrument section, the
best player. This morphed into "first seat" at the hands of
some moron, and then the English morphology got hold of it
and "seat" quickly morphed into "seed", so now we have
"First Seed" with the meaning ascribed to "First Chair".
The instant I heard it, it was clear any attempt to prevent
it was pointless when CBS Sports is on the job purveying dreck.

So do what I've had to do to stay married - do what you can
when you can to correct clear swill-mongering, but understand
that you are pushing uphill on a glacier.

     cheers,
     -mo