Philip Howard
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Living languages are in a continuous state of change. Only dead languages stay still, which is why Latin and Ancient Greek are the best languages for grammarians. They can legislate for dead languages, without finding that the languages have moved on while they were writing, and made their rules about correctness and incorrectness obsolete.
—Philip Howard, from U and Non-U Revisited, Richard Burke (ed.), 1978
Posted on January 29, 1999 at 2:55 PM
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