Well, I'm only a quasi-literate Zilder (tautology, you say?), but I think the good professor's speech is very fishy. I would hardly recognise proper structure if it jumped up and bit me on the assumptive, so maybe I'm biased. That said, I feel that he undermined the validity of his point by taking to the extreme. Obviously, some grasp of good structure is necessary for expressing content in a meaningful way, but he went very much further than that. I was able to construct a few sentences using only those words (and I did wonder about the absence of the word "only" from the instructions), but felt that the results simply demonstrate that language is not exclusively form, any more than it's exclusively content. The sentences I created were devoid of meaning, and in my simple world language is a tool for conveying meaning. I'd rather have a home where the walls were a little bit higgledy-piggledy and the door hinges squeak than a perfectly built empty house, with absolutely everything engineered to millimetric precision, and no life allowed in to disturb its pristine structure. The professor can go back to his academic fishbowl, and I'll go back to writing sloppily constructed prose that makes sense to the only person who cares about it.
