I posted a blog (or did I?) the other day.
Someone took offence (or did he?) and posted (or did he?) this comment:
"No offense, [sic]" he wrote, "but can we stop calling blog posts and blog articles 'blogs'? unless you actually are composing an entire collection of articles and posts each time you say you've written 'a blog', you're really not using the correct term and are just coming off as uninformed and just desperately trying to drop a buzzword (albeit incorrectly)."
I am not sure about this.
He is, I presume an American, because he wrote "no offense" instead of the British English "no offence". I have a suspicion the problem may be an example of two nations separated by a common language - even in cyberspace.
I am sure I have commonly seen and heard in the UK, the word "blog" used both for the collection within which the "posts" are... erm... posted... and for the individual blogs... erm... posts... themselves.
But, some might think surprisingly, I am no great upholder of 'correctness' in writing. If you get too hung up on the niceties of what is 'correct' and what is 'not correct', things can get pretty mind-numbingly dull, as I am about to prove...
I think the French are mad to have an academic body which decides what words and phrases are or are not 'correct' French. They are mad to try stopping 'Franglais'.
The nearest thing we have in Britain is the Oxford English dictionary which decides to include not what it thinks is 'correct' English but what has become common usage.
The sentence, "Men and women competed in a quiz with a £1,000 prize but the rules stated that, when the single eventual winner received THEIR money, THEY had to donate it to charity," is clearly grammatically incorrect, because "winner" is singular but "their" and "they " are both plural.
The Oxford English Dictionary decided several years ago that the use of "they" and "their" in this sort of sentence structure was "acceptable" usage simply because it had been so commonly used for years by everyone. The alternative would be saying "he or she" and "his or hers" instead of "they" and "their" every time the circumstance cropped up and your tongue and brain would go potty after a time.
In English, 'good' English is ultimately whatever way English speakers actually speak and write the language. The French are heading towards a dead language; ironically, they are stifling it by trying to protect it.
The English language is a bit like the Edinburgh Fringe. No-one actually organises the over-all thing, anyone can join in and it becomes all the more vibrant for it.
It is anarchy, but it works.
Shakespeare could not even spell his own name the same way every time he wrote it - he used various spellings. As far as I understand it, English spelling had no need to be uniform until Dr Johnson published his dictionary in 1755 - and, even now, we are in the anarchic position of having "humour" and "humor" and "colour" and "color" being correct in different places and how the fuck did "programme" and "program" and "aluminium" and "aluminum" ever come about? They're relatively new concepts!
I share comedian Stewart Lee's horror at the constant mis-use of apostrophes though it is a losing battle and what gets up my own personal nasal passages is the mis-use of commas around subordinate clauses and in lists.
If you have a list of A, B, C, D, and E there should be no comma before the "and" because, in a list, the commas represent "and"s - that's what they are, so it should be A, B, C, D and E (without the fourth comma).
But I think Americans have a different usage and the comma is correct in the US.
The abbreviation Mr for Mister should never have a full stop (i.e, Mr.) because the full stop represents an abbreviation as in etc. which has a full stop because the "etera" has been cut out. It's like the apostrophe in "don't" or "wasn't" - it shows there is a missing letter or letters.
People lament the change wrought in the language by the arrival of text messaging.
But who cares?
Shakespeare wrote in what was virtually a foreign language.
Chaucer certainly bloody well did.
Even some of the Victorian novelists are a bit heavy-going nowadays.
The English language is constantly changing, which is what makes it so vibrant.
I worked in Prague in the mid-1990s, writing scripts for TV voice-overs to read in Czech - a neat trick, as I did not speak, write nor understand Czech. The scripts were translated into Czech and I then had to direct the recording of the Czech-language voice-overs - giving the TV announcers direction on intonation and suchlike - another neat trick.
On several occasions, the translator came back to me and said: "I can't translate this exactly, because I can't translate the nuance. Czech has fewer words than English and I can't translate what I know you want to say."
It is like the (apparently untrue) story that Eskimos (sorry, Inuits) have 30-odd words for "snow" and we have only five or six.
English is a wonderful language because it is so rich but also because it is so fast-changing. And long may it continue to be so.
Language is about communication not rules.
According to an Oxford University professor who has seen her original manuscripts, Jane Austen was shit at grammar and crap at spelling. I happen to think she wrote dull novels as well (apart from Emma). Others disagree with me on that. But she is an example that great writers are about ideas not linguistic rules.
Grammar and punctuation can be 'cleaned up' by a sub-editor.
Clear ideas are what matter.
Now, if only someone could come up with a word to replace the valuable lost meaning of "gay"...
What a great word was lost there...
I am sure Jane Austen used it.