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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

Finally we've arrived at my favorite month.  At last there's plenty of 
time for posting, building cage frames, and smelling the flowers (if 
there be any).

Occasionally you'll meet people with a few college courses under their 
belt, who become regular authorities on everything.  One of the things 
these people often love to do will be to go around bopping other folks 
over the head with their mighty Webster's, declaring that some word 
doesn't exist or is being used incorrectly.  Of course, it's just 
another refuge of the clueless.  The word used to describe this behavior 
is "sophomoric"; _sophomore_ is literally Greek for "wise fool".  
Apparently this tradition of kids becoming self-styled know-it-alls 
after just one year of instruction goes way back.

On the first day of the first upper-division linguistics course I ever 
took, the teacher said something that really shocked me.  He said that 
no complete grammar has ever been written for any language.  This means 
that the ultimate authority for what is valid in the language, and what 
is not, lives in the heads of the speakers of the language and nowhere 
else.  Think about all the nuances of meaning that exist in English.  
For instance, "would you...?" does not mean literally "were you going 
to...?" as you might expect, but is used to ask a favor.  Likewise, 
"couldn't you..." doesn't mean "were you not able to...?" but is used to 
suggest an alternative course of action.  There's just no book where I 
can go to look up all the things that native speakers of a language know 
in their heads.

Language is also changing so fast that no book could ever keep up with 
it.  If I use the word "blog" in a way consistent with common usage, and 
a dictionary head doesn't understand it, it's the fault of the 
dictionary or the listener and not the speaker.  There is no patron 
saint of language out there, no deity authoritative enough to declare 
that "'ain't' isn't a word" and bop others over the head with it.

Sometimes these "errors" are so sweeping and cumulative that a new 
language results, complete with sophomoric academicians of its own.  For 
instance, if I really introduce a lot of errors into my Latin, I can 
easily end up with French.  That's right, those kooks at the Academie 
Francaise are actually worshipping a collection of errors, as Cicero 
would declare if he were around today.  If enough people fall in love 
with their "errors" it creates a language unto itself.

That's why tasteful postors, those who really have something substantial 
to contribute anyway, refrain from making comments about people's 
grammar or usage.

Bill