Well, I’m going to throw in the towel now. Guess what? The meaning of literal has literally changed. Dan was a little too gleeful to share this with me soon after I posted my last entry.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/15/living/literally-definition/index.html
This is an abomination. First, the powers that be (and who are they exactly?) decide it’s just A-OK to end a sentence in a preposition. Now, simply because people either don’t know the correct meaning of a word, or refuse to use it correctly, we’re going to just say that what’s wrong is right. Dan says language is a living thing, constantly subject to change. I say there are rules, and regulations, and Oxford commas, and that’s the right way to do things. I learned all the rules a long, long time ago, and I have no plans to start all over again. Literally.
Life is never going to be the same..
Just remember, I predicted the downfall of civilization. It’s a slippery slope.
I never studied Latin, but I’ve read that the rule against ending sentences with prepositions applies to Latin (etc.) but was mistakenly applied to formal English by undersexed pedants, in a misguided and futile attempt to regularize the unmanageable miasma which is English. Applying this rule to English leads to awkward contructions. The rule was of course routinely broken by contemporary Latin speakers, much as they wrote Roman numerals every which way in the historical record, despite the later appearance of strict and inflexible rules. But perhaps I don’t know about what I am speaking.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I don’t have any cousins so…and I thought you’d lost your comment privileges.
Common usage differs from professional usage. I think that a Ph.D. thesis that contains sentences which end with prepositions would not make the grade. Jill, how many laws have the attorneys where you have worked seen that contain sentences which end with prepositions (with the exception of Texas law,nperhaps)? And how much official paperwork have those same attorneys generated that contains sentences which end with prepositions
Oh Myrna, I don’t know how to break it to you, but…there are lawyers who cannot string together a coherent sentence. I agree about common v. professional, but I wouldn’t hold up lawyers as bastions of good grammar.
I am literally am sick over the news.
I knew you would be.