On Fri, August 6, 2010 11:44, Marco Milazzo wrote: > De-lurking to weigh in on the side of English teachers. > > Words are the medium of thought as well as communication. When we ignore > rules of language by saying "you know what I mean," we're eroding our > ability to think as well as to communicate, because thinking usually > depends on communication. Socrates or Sherlock Holmes develop their ideas > by speaking them to another person. So do we, or otherwise, why are we in > this group? > > An average American teenager and a philosopher can have the same thought, > but the teenager expresses it as vague, amorphous mish-mash of imprecise > words. He suggests the "flavor" of the thought, while the philosopher > expresses the thought precisely so that other people can understand it. > He does this by putting the idea into the accepted, standard form, not > some personal style. I'm thinking you haven't tried to read Kant or Hegel.... But okay, I'm generally in favor of precise language. There's rather a long history of fads in "rules" of English grammar, many of which were never valid rules at least by today's standards (the Victorians for example imported lots of Latin rules into English, where they make no sense; splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions for example are English traditions from time immemorial). And a lot of the rules are more class markers than issues of precision. "Ain't" is clear to everybody; it just marks you as a hick. > Rules can be relaxed for casual, everyday conversation. But you should > know the rules and observe them when we're trying to express ideas.. > > Can you imagine Socrates saying "Life isn't good, if you don't think about > stuff," instead of "The unexamined life is not worth living." That's a nice example. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
