> On Jan 29, 2018, at 1:37 AM, Rainer <[email protected]> wrote: > > I always thought that there must have been (sort of) an official reform. > > At least teachers must have a common opinion what to teach children. > > Apparently there was none in England.
Nothing is official in the English language. It changes by accident and accumulated error, like other languages, I suppose. There was a vogue for prescriptivism that got rolling in the early 1700’s, based on the idea that English had become debased, and the best people ought to take it in hand to reform it and dictate usage; you can find Jonathan Swift’s “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” here: https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/proposal.html Prescriptivism held sway for a couple of centuries — it was accepted, for example, that dictionaries were for the purpose of telling readers what usage was correct, rather than describing the language as actually spoken and written—without having much effect on the language, which continued to evolve. Webster's Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, caused an uproar because of its descriptivist approach. It included an entry for “bullshit” (which it defined as nonsense, prompting David Steinberg to remark that “Webster’s did it: got the one guy who doesn’t know what “bullshit” means…) and admitting that “ain’t” was widely used. It’s been called the first shot in the culture wars. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
