Can we be more chilled about some of the nonsense rules we were taught...

...and in my case used to teach? I have had a bit of a reputation for being a pedant over spelling and grammar amongst my friends, but have always understood English to be a 'dynamic' language in the full sense of that word. When I was at school, it was an offence to use 'alright', it had to be 'all right'. At university, in an English language class we learned that there was absolutely no reason for this anomaly when we had 'already', altogether' etc, so I resolutely refused to correct it when I saw 'alright' written down, but alerted students to the fact that in exams it was still not acceptable.

I learned a long time ago that it was the Victorians who tried to force the rules of a dead language (Latin) onto English to make it 'respectable'. Then I saw this yesterday and, with one exception, I agreed with everything he says about English grammar and spelling. I wonder what you think?

[media=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BccyQaNKXz8&t=14s]

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ArishMell · 70-79, M

I was taught that "alright" is an Americanism. I do not know if that was ever really so, but I have noticed the American dialect is less concerned with etymology than is British English.

Really, what counts is that the message is clear, comprehensible, concise and mellifluous in both speech and writing. The first two qualities lead to the last anyway.

I try to allow for genuine personal difficulties with language, but dislike clumy artifices like supefluous
"ations / isations", and muddling the noun and verb forms of a word.

If the expression is clumsily worded or stuffed with silly cliches I start to doubt the message. Examples include hanging comparators, sloppy use of percentages, silly cliches and metaphorical use of technical terms the user does not understand.

E.g.. doubling down, "rabbit holes", "exponential" and "sesimic shifts". Respectively these are: ridiculous outside of its strict meaning in American casinos, merely silly, wrong unless the increase (or decrease) genuinely is exponential, and just meaningless.

I may also start to look for what is not said, as well as what is.

Latin is not dead except in regular use. Latin quietly supports the English, French and Italian languages by supplying root-words. It forms more directly many technical words in biology and medicine, and the Law. Latin was used by learned people so widely and so recently historically that reading old documents in so many fields, requires specialists fluent in reading it. Literature from the Roman and Greek Classical times is still very popular, thanks to having been translated.