ABSTRACT
The appalling casualness of the current use of language, remarked upon by so many literary critics today—deficiencies in grammar and vocabulary, ignorance of shades of meaning, indifference to traditional and/or reasonable rules of proper usage—could be a subject for a thousand-page lexicographical study. This chapter confines Utopian ideal paper opening section to a few representative notes illustrating the cultural zero-sum game in which the new words win and the old language loses. The rimes of London was judicious, if a tad light-hearted, in its summing-up of the grand debate over adverbial deployment: "The most diligent search can find no modern grammarian to pedantically, to dogmatically, to invariably condemn a split infinitive. The split infinitive debate is always welcome. It emphasizes what is vital to language, the rhythm and power that grammar bestows on the passing parade of words. Language is a beautiful thing: what a shame to waste it on political illiterates.
