The backstory here is that I shared rooms in college with a historical linguist, much smarter than me, who used to instruct me on the importance of being a non-prescriptivist, using grammatically perfect sentences. I had to figure out a way to keep up my side of the conversation.
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Adam Mosley
The thing about biological evolution -- and, I like to think, linguistic change -- is that viability (of life, of precise and meaningful communication) is secured by mechanisms that resist change as well as those that produce it... If the change is too fast btw generations, there is non-viability.
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