As each new year seems to generate lists of words and phrases that are apparently crimes against "proper" English, I will ask agaain a query that has not yet been answered. It is a question for the adamant prescriptivists, those who draw Nazca lines in the sands of our language, and insist that none may cross them (the lines or the authors thereof, it matters not).

I am currently reading a fascinating book on the circumstances and history of the period around the disappearance of Geoffrey Chaucer from the historical record. The book has a great many quotations from his works. All are presented in both the original and in Modern English. I'm grateful for this because even though I can actually manage to make sense of the original, the effort required is more than I'd choose to spend, since his English and mine are quite different animals. So here's the question:

Who gets to decide what are the inviolable rules of English? If breaking "the rules" is so heinous, and if new coinages and usages are invariably condemned as heretical, corruptions of the "purity" of the language, why don't all prescriptivists speak the language of Beowulf?

noho ora mai
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