Begging the question

[12th Doctor]

No. Their are far worst grammatical atrocities.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

The one that bugs me most is "I could care less." I mean a second grader could point out the grammatical incorrectness there.

I know what you are getting at, and the problem is that you assume that there must be a certain innate logic to language, much as the original English grammarians did.

So let me ask you this, and this is an example I have used a 100 times:

We are told that you should never use a double negative.  Why?  Well, because a double negative is a logical fallacy.  You are contradicting yourself if you use one.  What could be worse, and more grammatically incorrect than that?

Well, double negatives are a grammatically correct in French, and indeed, alot of languages.

However, in English, almost every non-standard dialect, from India, to England to here in the United States contains double negatives.  If you hear people speaking a fluent non-standard, then chances are they are going to use a double negative at least once.

But, in French, they drop the double negative in almost every non-standard dialect... and oddly enough, they drop out the "No" which is the word that originally meant the negative and just keep "pas" which is a word that originally meant "step"... that's besides the point, though.

My point is this... why is it that English is so much more logical than French?  And then why is it that the French people are so much more logical than people who speak English?

I don't have any problems with double negatives. But that statement above is literally meaning the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean, and it could easily be fixed with two letters and an apostrophe.

But it is the same premise.  Language doesn't mold itself, necessarily, around the "rules of logic".  Just so long as most people know what the other is saying....

[minionofmidas]

I don't have any problems with double negatives. But that statement above is literally meaning the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean, and it could easily be fixed with two letters and an apostrophe.

And a double negative is literally meaning the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean, and it could easily be fixed by the omission of two letters and an apostrophe.

Same diff.

Well, of course; it's not unambiguous any more. That's exactly what I'm complaining about.

No. It never was unambiguous. That's exactly how it came to be used differently.

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Yeah, I understand what's meant by that - objecting to some linguistic change, not on the grounds that it is change but on the grounds that it's bad. With arguments for why it's bad.
As it so happens, it's exceedingly easy to dress up moronic linguistic conservatism as moderate linguistic conservatism.
And to claim that the misuse of a rather tortured translation for a rather tortured latin rhetorical term for an admittedly rather common type of behavior, by using it for what it sounds like it means usually in contexts where no danger of confusion exists, is somehow... er, relevant... is pretty stunning actually.  (Damn chain clauses. This is actually a perfectly comprehensible sentence if listened to spoken aloud with the stresses in the right place.) Certainly the wrong usage isn't doing any harm to the original phrase.

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That is indeed what I'm saying. The purpose of language is communication; not variety.[/quote]No. Language serves many purposes. Communication and Being Different From Other People being two of the most important.

[Хahar 🤔]

No. Their are far worst grammatical atrocities.

Grammar is an artificial concept, and one that is of little use to anyone.

Language changes all the time, when a language ceases to change, it is dead.  Deal with it.

THis. It annoys me without end when people say "ain't" is somehow improper.

[minionofmidas]

Besides, if noone pronounced "I couldn't care less" as "I could care less", I couldn't then say "I could care less, but it would be pretty hard to do" or "I could care less, but not very much less" or similar.

[A18]

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I take it you think that the traditional definition is not (and never was) sustainable, because the phrase sounds too much like "that begs for the question." But "that begs for the question" is an incredibly awkward construction; and as such, the analogy is scarcely inevitable. (Indeed, a Google Book Search turns up a mere two pages of results, all from the past couple of decades.)

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I actually had no trouble with it. But yeah, next time add some commas.

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Oh, the latter may well be a "purpose[]" it serves. Likewise, differentiated languages make ordering fast food as irritating an experience as possible for a great many of us. Plus a hundred other things. Now, how many of these are important, or even positive... that's a value judgment. We disagree, but it remains a valid reason for me to endorse a moderate prescriptivism.

[dead0man]

No. Their are far worst grammatical atrocities.

Grammar is an artificial concept, and one that is of little use to anyone.

Language changes all the time, when a language ceases to change, it is dead.  Deal with it.

THis. It annoys me without end when people say "ain't" is somehow improper.

I agree with you guys.  As long as you get your point across without distracting the reader too much, who cares if your apostrophe's ain't in the right place or you've got a dangling participle...whatever the hell that means.