'Tis a pity that anyone should have to worry about such a quibble.Well, I wouldn't characterize it as a "worry", that seems tenfold intense than I was... another missing wink from my fingertips, I guess.
Personally, I don't see the connection between love of the language,(nor do I)
which presumably draws us all to AWADtalk in the first place, and obsessiveness about formal rules and structure which draws attention away from substance.Well, let's not get philosophical, but, whether or not the attention I pay to breaking formal rules and structure "proves the rule by it's exception", "obsessiveness"... I just don't see it reach anywhere near that level. From what I can tell silence seems to a better tool for critcism... but then, I'm used to silence.
An ounce of originality is worth a pound of pedantry, if not in AWADtalk, at least in the real world.
Interesting that originality seldom surfaces without breaking someone's time-honored conventions. Spoken like a true "Ron Obvious"
No doubt, the first outbreak of originality is always a scandal to some.I've never equated 'obsessiveness' with 'scandal', but lemme werk on that one fer awhile...
So it was with the first person who used the phrase "the hoi polloi" because it sounded more right to the ordinary english ear than to the rule-bound ear of a scholar.Hmmm... aside from a 'rule-bound ear' having as much (quite often more) claim on 'ordinary' than any other ear, something tells me there was no "right sound" in the ordinary ear to compare with when combining *English with a new, foreign word/word phrase.
Ya parbably had to be there...
