The American Spectator

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p> MODERN AMERICAN USAGE BR>Re: Christopher Orlet's Grammar for Smarties : p>I found Christopher Orlet's article "Grammar for Smarties" quite interesting, since it represents one of my pet peeves -- the accepted degradation of the English language. It's a good thing that there is still is a large segment of our populace intent on saving the language, even though they are saddled with the seemingly retrogressive handle of "Luddite." Actually, I think most of the Luddites don't oppose change so much as they oppose complete disregard for proper grammar, composition, and spelling. New words will come along, and others will become archaic -- but some of the things we hear and see written nowadays are truly atrocious. p>Just as an aside: it's too bad and rather ironic that a typo (perhaps using one of those "new" words) sneaked in the article -- last paragraph, first sentence -- it should be "necessarily" I believe. :) Of all places for that to happen --in an article on English grammar (and I realize that this is a sentence fragment --used for emphasis only). :-) BR>-- Gary W. Johnson BR>Huntsville, Alabama p>I'm not aware of any extant grammars in English of the rigorous sort that one sees for other languages, particularly those available for Greek, e.g., Greek Grammar by Herbert Weir Smyth, Harvard, 1920, and Latin such as the Cambridge A Student's Latin Grammar

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