vurala.blogg.se

It is a pity that there is now a community of people who are so fussy, that they risk stagnating the language. Rather fun! It has certainly turned English into a rich if a rather confusing way of communicating ideas. The noble bard just invented words when he couldn't think of one. People spelt words as they came across them, and grammar had to tolerate the same twists and turns dependent on geography and the knowledge of the writer.

Before the OED in the UK, there was no such thing as consistency of spelling. I love the fact that someone will write "thru" instead of "through" (depending on country) or will mess up ideas in a rap and all those other things that keep a language alive. I am a lover of the way that popular culture tears language apart and reinvents it for a new world. As a reviewer friend of mine pointed out the other day, there must be some pedantic readers for whom reading is a very bitter and angry experience. I do need whatever I read to be readable, but I want to visit an author's mind, especially within the realms of fiction, not the mind of some student of grammar who cannot see past either a mistake or, worse, an intentional twist to the style of the story. All a complete load of bollocks, to be honest. Oh, and that swearing was only for the lazy and badly educated. I was educated to believe there was good and bad use of English (bad should be punished), that there was only one "proper way" of saying something, and that spelling was so much more important than creativity. Languages are living things and they are a reflection of culture. It is a little bit of a pain, but I am very tolerant of people's foibles in English.

I am not dyslexic, not properly so, but I can reverse letters very easily and do strange things that I just don't notice or sometimes cannot see. I admit to a little word blindness at times. (Quick ramble first, so scroll down if you just want to read about Grammarly.) UPDATE: Having suffered some fairly critical problems with the plugin, including problems with multiple-monitor setups, crashing, false-positives, and no UK English support, I have now stopped using Grammarly and use StyleWriter 4 instead. Grammar should not be a slave to the pedant