I've fought a long, hard battle over "whom" and "it is I," and I'm almost ready to concede defeat. When leading journalists say "Who they met" and "It's me," I realize the next edition of Webster's Dictionary may well list the phrases as preferred.
But that is the way a language grows, I guess, even though I must wipe a tear from my eye as I write this.
Let me look up a word in a dictionary - any dictionary from A Child's First Dictionary to the ever-faithful Webster's Collegiate, the bible of high school and college - and I would find the word and then wander through the pages as if I were reading P.T. James.
GOING WITH THE FLOW?
My father, who was a language-buff extraordinaire, had a book I'd sit and browse through by the hour, called "English as She is Spoke." It was packed with wonderful examples of the ways that speakers and writers have mangled the English language over the years.
Unfortunately, reading it made me a compulsive defender of the King's English translated into American.
"It's me" makes my head ache. "Who are you calling?" makes my legs tremble, and a dangling participle all but required medical assistance. As you can imagine, many of my conversations end with me on the floor in a dead faint.
Perhaps the time is past for such precession. The end of the world didn't come when schools stopped teaching diagramming, though I was sure it would.
I suppose "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" didn't convince the non-users of the need for commas in today's world, and still we continue to communicate more or less successfully. I think maybe the time has come to go with the flow.
STIRRING UP TROUBLE
The English language is a growing thing, and the soil has to be turned every so often to shake things up a bit. Webster's Dictionary came out with a new edition recently and caused havoc in the dictionary world by joining the ranks of the politically correct.
No longer do we have negative descriptions of words. Correct and incorrect, proper and improper, even humorous and jocular have been banished. Words and phrases that not too long ago would have been considered slang or even incorrect or improper are now "acceptable" or apparently left behind in the scrap heap.
Ain't, among others, is now acceptable, "though disapproved by many and more common in less-educated speech, in most parts of the country."
Generations of English teachers are spinning in their graves. Critics are up in arms, and The New York Times has gone back to Webster's second edition.
The world of words is ready for armed combat. Amid a world in turmoil, wars, famine, natural disasters on all sides, it's comforting to know that even the revered New York Times is engaged in a battle for the best way to "tell it like it is."
As for me, I think I'll sit this one out (slang for an expression used in the game of poker) and see which way the big ball bounces (slang for which way the situation works out).
Roberta Cole can be reached via e-mail at needitor@nwlink.com.
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