ABSTRACT
Purists tend to concentrate not on intelligibility or the pervasiveness of a form but on an item’s etymology, on details of pronunciation, on grammatical precision and on style.
Many purists dislike semantic change (insisting, for example, that aggravate does not mean ‘irritate’), recommend Latin-based structures (It is I.) and insist on logical usage (‘since due to is a complement it cannot, logically, occur at the beginning of a sentence’).
