Rachel
Stan CareyNothing in #language is permanent except the conviction that standards are somehow always falling.
TRiG@stancarey Just finished reading Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. He's quite amusing on this point.
@TRiG Good book, that
@stancarey I read his second book first (Through the Language Glass) and loved it. The Unfolding of Language took a little longer to grab me, but got there in the end.
I quite enjoy the way Deutscher in both cases writes as much about the history of ideas as he does about linguistics.
@TRiG Yes. I remember being struck by TtLG's account of Lazarus Geiger and how his idea about the sequence of colour terms was pretty much ignored for a century, till Berlin and Kay
Lynn McAlister UE 
@stancarey To be fair, in some case a look back at history supports that view. If we hadn't started using the second person plural for second person singular, we wouldn't now be forced to invent plurals (y'all, yous, you guys, etc.). Changes that impair clarity aren't advances.
@lmgenealogy @stancarey No one said it was an advance. Language changes. It changes constantly.
@TRiG @stancarey As does everything else.
Joe McVeigh@stancarey In my history of English course, I talk about English entering its age of anxiety in the 1700s - when these ideas of "proper" language arouse around the creation of a standardized form.
I really like the term (can't remember where it's from) and I'd argue we're still in the age of anxiety. But maybe things are getting better.
The Lichtenbergian@stancarey I ain't never heard nothing about that kinda thing. What are you talking about?
Mans R
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for January 25, 1993 | GoComics.com
Calvin: I like to verb words. Hobbes: What? Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when "access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed. Verbing weirds language. Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.