Do you think that we should, Jack? Their rulings have virtually the power of law. And the second President of the United States, John Adams, was a big supporter of an academy and he recommended that Congress take it up. The kind of French that it pronounces to be official French is not the French that is spoken on the streets when somebody asks you for a cigarette or you go out for dinner and order your meal.
And I think it would be the same in English. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. My guests are Jack Lynch. Our number is Is that really true?
LYNCH: Well, yes, spoken English is different from written English but there are many different spoken Englishes and many different written Englishes, and the notion that one of them is correct and all the rest are wrong is a dangerous superstition.
Some of them are suitable for some situations and some suitable for others, and some are appealing and some are ugly and some are efficient and some are poetic, and they all have their different place. Now the problem with issuing rules on the official form of the language is, first, it assumes that there is one form of the language and, second, it assumes that people are actually going to pay attention to the rules. Well, I teach English.
I teach my students, you know, everything does not go. There are some kinds of language that you have to use, and they mostly correspond with what people have called proper English but they need to learn how to speak, say, in job interviews. They need to know how to write reports and so on. So correct English in those cases, they actually usually preferred the term polite English, was the kind of English spoken by the people higher up in the social hierarchy.
A lot of the questions that are discussed in terms of what language is best come down to two things: circumstances and style. And we do this in all the varieties of our lives, all the different places that we encounter new circumstances. They tend to be people who have, themselves, moved from one class to another. Now, modern conservatism, at least in the form of, say, the Republican Party is sometimes fairly libertarian and sometimes interventionist.
Modern conservatives, for the most part—and this is a broad generalization—but for the most part modern conservatives are libertarian when it comes to the free market. On the other hand, they like to get interventionist on questions of morality. The government should step in and regulate obscenity and drug use and sex and so on. We need stern discipline. A curious observation. There have been words that have not been included in dictionaries based on moral grounds, including words that might not seem so offensive today.
They wanted to include every word that had been used by a sufficient number of people but without any judgment of whether these words are right or wrong. LYNCH: …but another one that was left out was the word condom. One of the readers came across the description of this obscene device, he said, which saves fornicators from a well-deserved clap, and he insisted that this word should not appear in the dictionary.
And the editor in chief went along with him on that. It did later make in into a revision, but he found the whole concept so offensive that he did not want to spread the word in the dictionary. Even in the different major Englishes spoken around the world right now, you will have certain words taken in a different way.
In Australian politics, bloody can be heard in Parliament but in the U. George Carlin did this routine in about the seven words that you can never say on television or radio. But in , a radio station played this routine at two in the afternoon. There were complaints and the FCC fined the station, and this led to a battle that made its way all the way to the Supreme Court.
So this foul-mouthed champion of free speech inadvertently wrote the law on censorship. Sam is calling from San Diego. Good morning, Sam, and welcome to These Days. I wonder if we could distinguish between words on the one hand and grammar on the other. So we could be descriptive as to about the lexicon but prescriptive as to about grammar. Thank you for the call. Ain't is also commonly used in informal and humorous phrases, as shown in the examples below.
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Learner's Dictionary mobile search. Learner's Dictionary. Ask the Editor. Serenity Carr , Assistant Editor. What does "ain't" mean and how is it used? Salah , Egypt. I ain't going. They ain't home. He ain't answering his phone. Kids Definition of ain't. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your vocabulary with our question quiz! Love words?
Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Nov. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? How 'literally' can mean "figuratively". Literally How to use a word that literally drives some pe Is Singular 'They' a Better Choice? The awkward case of 'his or her'.
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