•August 5, 2020•
Jim Baumann

Hi, my name is Jim, and I’m a prescriptivist.
There ought to be a self-help organization for those of us who cling desperately to the language that was beaten into us — in some cases — as children.
The way they tell it, chums who attended parochial schools had to endure withering glances and the threat of rapped knuckles, while I lived in fear only of B’s at my public schools.
For whatever reason, they and I still find it hard to let go of the conventions of our youth and allow English some breathing room. Many of us look with suspicion upon new words and syntax and tend to shun them.
Hey, change is hard.
Compared to Latin, English is a teenager. It grows and changes every day. Say you’re 70 and your grandson is 15. Should it be so strange that you speak a different language when he was taught an updated — note I didn’t write “upgraded” — version of English a half century after you?     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.