| Holga 135bc |
[Thursday
14:43, 22nd, May, 2008] |
( +5 )
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[Tuesday
23:17, 20th, May, 2008] |
 
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| Regulators and Guardians |
[Thursday
14:22, 22nd, May, 2008] |
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Sometimes a society assigns its language-regulating function to a government agency, such as France's L'Académie Française, established in 1635. However, no such agencies have survived for English, a great drifting sponge of a language. Some of the English-language keepers, fearing chaos, have appointed themselves regulators and guardians.Their mission: to strengthen the standard around which responsible users of the language can regroup, fend off corruption, and monitor change.
... Such language guardians are worthy people, even when driven by egos the size of Webster's unabridged. They are heroes. Their teeth ache, the freethinkers mock them, their children rebel. Undeterred, they fight for precision in the language. They will argue with mind-boggling tenacity, for example, that boggle is an intransitive verb and therefore incapable of transmitting action from subject to object. The mind can boggle at something, but nothing can boggle the mind. So there.
The Elements of Expression, by Arthur Plotnik
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[Thursday
14:40, 22nd, May, 2008] |
( +2 )
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[Thursday
13:16, 22nd, May, 2008] |
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There's a tornado in my town right now. I don't even know where to start being scared.
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[Thursday
12:48, 22nd, May, 2008] |
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There's this beautiful and inconvenient thing called falling in love with your very first boyfriend all over again.
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