A society is generally as lax as its language. December 1999, Vol. I recently received an email invitation to subscribe to The Vocabula Review. Before deciding, I browsed the archives on the web to get a flavor of the newsletter. For decades and even centuries, these arguments have been thrown in vain in the way of relentless language change.
Prescriptive grammar is as presumptuous, as naive, as futile as prescriptive meteorology.
Language and the process of language change are natural phenomena. They go on, indifferent to all of our wishes and musings about what should and should not be. Language is an amazingly complex thing because it is for the most part the very embodiment of how the human mind works. I believe that what defines humans is their ability to manipulate thoughts, meanings, the boundaries of reference of things concrete and abstract. Language is the tool.