Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
From David Crystal
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.
Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'
It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows.
At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.
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