My grandparents displayed the most ornate of orthographies. Even grocery lists looked to be, at first glance, some filagreed formal document (grade school early 1900's). My left hand would often feel my grandmother's ruler as my cursive sucked (am left handed - sinister, you bet - but grandparents were intent on my using my right - but that's another story).
When one's main sources of inspiration are quickly typed out missives/dispatches cast into the ether, or the LCD vocabulary/cadence of televison, well... Reading more and reading widely is the best cure.
Insofar as the usage/evolution of American English is concerned. A couple of quotes from experts (both books can be read online):
When one's main sources of inspiration are quickly typed out missives/dispatches cast into the ether, or the LCD vocabulary/cadence of televison, well... Reading more and reading widely is the best cure.
Insofar as the usage/evolution of American English is concerned. A couple of quotes from experts (both books can be read online):
Precision is much, but not all; some words and phrases are disallowed on the ground of taste. As there are neither standards nor arbiters of taste, the book can do little more than reflect that of its author, who is far indeed from professing impeccability. In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has supplied) many "awful examples"--his later work less abundantly, he hopes, than his earlier. He nevertheless believes that this does not disqualify him for showing by other instances than his own how not to write. The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing seeds to the white blackbirds
Write It Right, Ambrose Bierce: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12474
Write It Right, Ambrose Bierce: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12474
More than once, plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax during the writing and revision of the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I have found the enchanted purist erring himself. The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.
The American Language, H.L. Mencken: http://www.bartleby.com/185/
The American Language, H.L. Mencken: http://www.bartleby.com/185/
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