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SW-User
I'd disagree in the UK. In key stage 2 now a large chunk of time is dedicated to SPAG Spelling Punctuation And Grammar.
However it is via a set of rules the government laid down and language is actually a continuously involving entity. Now according to the SPAG rules you can only use an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence beginning with either How or What. 🤷♂️
However it is via a set of rules the government laid down and language is actually a continuously involving entity. Now according to the SPAG rules you can only use an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence beginning with either How or What. 🤷♂️
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@SW-User I am pleased to read that, though not sure if the SPAG programme designers are always right.
Surely, a sentence starting with "How" and in many cases, with "What", is a question; if so, would ending it with an exclamation-mark be wrong!, sorry, ?
A shop in Weymouth had the word Eat's in its prominent sign-writing. It attracted a lot of adverse comment, though it is said sometimes bad publicity is good for business, and eventually it was corrected to Eats - still poor English but at least without the apostrophe!
There - I've used a "!" without a How or What.
'
I do agree languages evolve, especially when new words are needed for genuinely novel, physical things or abstract entities. My tourists' hand-book to basic Greek, for example, says that although someone who learnt the language from Classical Greek literature would be understood by a modern Greek, but would sound very old-fashioned and stilted.
However, this used to be a gradual process, altering style more than definitions but accepting new terms for new things, including those in linguistic borrowings. English is deeply Graeco-Latinate but borrows much from Scandinavia (especially in Northern English) and India, for example. Sadly though, so many changes now are forced and accepted by ignorance, carelessness or ill-will, that a formerly-mellifluous and expressive language becomes weak, debased and clumsy.
Perhaps now, thirty-five years after 1984, George Orwell's "Newspeak" is not quite the fiction it was.
Surely, a sentence starting with "How" and in many cases, with "What", is a question; if so, would ending it with an exclamation-mark be wrong!, sorry, ?
A shop in Weymouth had the word Eat's in its prominent sign-writing. It attracted a lot of adverse comment, though it is said sometimes bad publicity is good for business, and eventually it was corrected to Eats - still poor English but at least without the apostrophe!
There - I've used a "!" without a How or What.
'
I do agree languages evolve, especially when new words are needed for genuinely novel, physical things or abstract entities. My tourists' hand-book to basic Greek, for example, says that although someone who learnt the language from Classical Greek literature would be understood by a modern Greek, but would sound very old-fashioned and stilted.
However, this used to be a gradual process, altering style more than definitions but accepting new terms for new things, including those in linguistic borrowings. English is deeply Graeco-Latinate but borrows much from Scandinavia (especially in Northern English) and India, for example. Sadly though, so many changes now are forced and accepted by ignorance, carelessness or ill-will, that a formerly-mellifluous and expressive language becomes weak, debased and clumsy.
Perhaps now, thirty-five years after 1984, George Orwell's "Newspeak" is not quite the fiction it was.