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Originally Posted by thinkxingu
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Moving on: it's a good question about whether or not standard English is alive. It absolutely is—my students all understand the need to shift depending on circumstance. Their ability to do so, however, depends directly on how much their lives have incorporated reading and writing...outside the classroom....
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Any language evolves with sustained and widespread use of what's nonstandard. What now is unacceptable later becomes acceptable. Some of the changes come by way of insistence on "political correctness" w.r.t. gender, while others come from lack of insistence on correct usage. It just seems an awful shame when change comes from ignorance of the language rather than from need. Regardless of whether such language evolution is acceptable, misuse and ignorance of proper grammar often marks the speaker or writer with a certain flavor of "uneducated," to his detriment in various ways.