caligula04/linguistics

From the page: "See, for example, English is not Latin:

In an email a few weeks ago, my former assistant (and alarmingly successful writer/director) Rawson Thurber apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition. I insisted that he was well within his rights to dangle a preposition, split an infinitive, or break pretty much any rule he%u2019d been taught about English %u2013 especially the seemingly-arbitrary ones.

Grammarians come in two flavors. A descriptivist studies the way people use a language, while a prescriptivist tries to lay down the rules of a language.

Prescriptivists are assholes. Ignore them."