Vernon:
Here's what the guy said:
"It has long been a principle of mine that a sentance (sic) contining (sic) the word 'only' and a sum of money can only be considered grammatically accurate if it is about one's salary.
"'I am only paid £70 per day' good formation
"'I only spent £3.75 on breakfast' grammatical nonsense. It must be possible to spend less than that. Or cook it youself (sic)."
The person who wrote that is, at best, a jerk. It had absolutely no place in the discussion at hand and speaks only to the size of the person's monstrous ego and minuscule intellect.
Only is one of those words that changes sentence meaning dramatically based upon its position in the sentence.
"ONLY I am paid £70 per day" says that the speaker is the only person who gets that salary as does "I ONLY am paid £70 per day".
It's when you get to "I am ONLY paid £70 per day" and "I am paid ONLY £70 per day" that you get to where the writer is coming from about the paucity of his salary. These two sentences are a mild complaint about how much money the speaker makes.
The sentence takes on a different tenor when you put the only at the end: "I am paid £70 per day ONLY" most likely means that the speaker does not earn by the hour.
The sentence takes on similarly varied meanings when you move the only around, but with some differences, viz. "I spent £3.75 on breakfast ONLY". This to me is a statement that the speaker probably spent more money for food but this amount went for breakfast and it's depending upon context more than likely a complaint about the cost of food. And that differs significantly from the sentence "I spent ONLY £3.75 on breakfast" which is most likely a mild boast that the speaker was able to save a bit of money on his morning meal.
There are similar varied shadings of the meaning of the sentence when you write:
"ONLY I spent £3.75 on breakfast"
"I ONLY spent £3.75 on breakfast"
"I spent £3.75 ONLY on breakfast"
"I spent £3.75 on ONLY breakfast".
Note that the original sentence is subject to two interpretations based upon context. It might have been meant to say "ONLY I spent £3.75 on breakfast" or "I spent ONLY £3.75 on breakfast".
I don't think this is prescriptivism rearing its head; rather I believe that it's simply a matter of the varying semantics of a sentence that is changing by the way the words are put together.
TEd
