78 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
78 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
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From werner Wed Oct 26 14:06:34 1988
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Flags: 000000000001
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From: roller@hocpa.UUCP
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Subject: The Future of the English Language
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Keywords: smirk
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Date: 26 Oct 88 03:30:04 GMT
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I'm sorry to report that I don't know who wrote the following
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discussion of the future of English. It given to me nearly ten years
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ago when I was a professor at Southern Methodist University.
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Although I had many excellent students at SMU, there is no denying
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that the style of this document resembles that of some term papers I
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received.
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Paul Michaelis AT&T Bell Labs att!hocpa!roller
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
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This sentence demonstrates alot of the to frequent
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errors that occur in my freshman composition classes, its
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not just there willingness to gleefully split an infinitive
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or end a sentence with a preposition which are the problems
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kindly boarding school masters used to be concerned with.
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Its true my students arent the good mannered middle class
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bunch who I went to school with, there more often cops or
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shoesalesmens or garbagemens (pardon me, sanitationmens)
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sons and daughters, and yet there a sharp group, wary,
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skeptical, bright.
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So when I knock myself out day after day class after
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class explaining the genitive case in english, the proper
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position of commas, the runon sentence, the distinction
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between the three theres and still these mistakes appear
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even in the work of the best of them I wonder.
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I wonder if just maybe they know something I dont about
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the english language. Something intuitive about its history
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and something instinctive about its future. After all, its
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been the movement of the language to progress toward
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simplicity. The case structure, with its confusing endings,
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was an early victim. Why say "On his dagum hierde Gregorius
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goda lara" when with a little reliance on word order and
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common sense you can more simply say "In his time Gregorys
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heard good lectures"?
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Besides the nagging whom the last vestige of the case
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structure in english is the genitives use of the apostrophe.
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But surely common sense and word order indicate the genetive
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usage and my students perception is correct in eliminating
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the troublesome superscript.
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Theres wisdom in doing away with punctuation that
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doesnt contribute to clarity and when my classes
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monolithically dispose of pointless spelling distinctions
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where the sense is obvious there judgment may be sound.
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Then again, alot of my colleagues lose sleep over the
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way some students slam two words or letters into one but
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metathesis or the changing of the position of sounds or
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letters is a venerable tradition, or else a newt might still
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be an ewt.
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Words in english usually explain themselves by position
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and context, though of course there exceptions to this rule
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which my students in there foresight have not anticipated
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but give them awhile and they will.
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I cant go into detail about every grammatical
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innovation made by my students, theres alot to recommend
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them though and if your an editor, the author of an english
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grammar or the perpetrator of a work on footnote logic and
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you can read this you should pay attention to my class
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because one day they might take over and one day you might
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wake up. And discover your fired.
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--
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.
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If you MUST reply to a rejection, include a description of your joke
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because there is 0 chance I will remember which one it was.
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