Job Discussion Forums

[Sashadroogie]

I'd recommend Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds for a novel which goes out of its way to ignore, play with, or deliberately violate "conventions". Riotously funny too.

[rogerwallace]

if everyone in in comand of english, this could be why few people have but a rote understanding of it. It's also why few students(at least in china) rarely graduate from an american university, unless their parents have very deep pockets.
Its also why its ludicrous to teach literature when students don't even have a vocabulary of more than 8000 words. Prefix/suffix and Latin root-words make up the majority of English, so whenthat isn't focused on, the result is -whatever...

[desultude]

[johnslat]

Dear desultude,

Oh, you slyboots, you.

Regards,
John

[desultude]

[LarssonCrew]

For the development of words that are officially included in English, Oxford Presses releases it's updated Oxford Dictionary is very much considered the mecca as for whether a word is officially an English word.

As to the allowing of certain styles, what should be used and when etc., god knows.

[Justin Trullinger]

A number of scholars would reject the OED as any particular authority, though it is, in fact, a pretty informative dictionary.

Historically it's been extremely centric in its attitude to non-British variants of English, though it's better about this recently.

If you have the chance to have a browse, though, you can find a lot of stuff in the OED that isn't really closely tied to any English use I've run into.

The official authority it ain't.


Best,
Justin

[Chancellor]

This thread seems more like the debate between prescriptive and descriptive.

http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/grammarintro.htm