Free Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter Page B

English—i.e., a loosey-goosey stipulation linguists make out of “permissiveness”—but typical of countless other languages in the world that don’t make much use of suffixes to mark parts of speech. In Cantonese Chinese, lengjái can mean “good-looking guy,” “to become good-looking,” and “good-looking”: noun, verb, and adjective. No one in China is writing in to newspapers complaining about it.
    But somehow, a sense persists that nouns becoming verbs in English is icky, a messy transgression. Told that English speakers have been, as it were, turning fax into fax forever, people remain convinced that there’s still something “wrong” with it. And we won’t even get into how people feel about Billy and me went to the store and the idea that me is wrong because it’s an object pronoun referring to a subject. (Actually, we will get into it, but not just yet.)
    Trying to get into the head of how people feel about these things even when presented with linguists’ protestations, I sense that the resistance is based on an understandable pride in having mastered these “rules.” You’ve got your ducks in a row, and except when exhausted or on glass number three of wine, you have no trouble producing Billy and I . You learned what subjects and objects are, you learned your Parts of Speech. As such, you don’t like someone coming along and deeming your effort and vigilance worthless. It must feel like someone telling you that it would be perfectly appropriate, natural even, to give in to the untutored impulse to chew with your mouth open.
    The problem is that with all due understanding of that feeling, the “rules” we are taught to observe do not make sense, period. All attention paid to such things is like medievals hanging garlic in their doorways to ward off evil spirits. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me , singular they , and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.
    Over the years, I have gotten the feeling that there isn’t much linguists can do to cut through this commitment to garlic-hanging among English speakers. There are always books out that try to put linguists’ point across. Back in 1950, Robert Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! was all over the place, including a late edition kicking around in the house I grew up in. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct , which includes a dazzling chapter on the grammar myths, has been one of the most popular books on language ever written. As I write, the flabbergastingly fecund David Crystal has just published another book in the tradition, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. But the air of frustration in Crystal’s title points up how persistent the myths are. Maybe we just can’t get through.
    However, in this chapter I want to venture one more stab. If you understand that the phrasing of Did you see what he’s doing ? was injected into English by non-native speakers, and that there was once an English where no one would have put it that way, and that then, for a while there was an English where lots of people were putting it that way but it sounded quaint and awkward to others, you are in a position to truly “get” the message. The message: the notion that people are always “slipping up” in using their native English is fiction.

Now Versus Then
    There is a paradox in how lovers of language often process English and the way it varies from mouth to mouth from decade to decade.
    No one has trouble with the fact that the Old English of Beowulf is a different language than Modern English. On the contrary, the pathway from then until now is seen as a noble procession. First, majestic, flinty strophes of Old English handwritten on ancient paper, chronicling kings and battles and laws and such, a language closely akin to German. Then, Middle