My distaste for middle-aged women is already well-documented. But the ways I'm gonna kick Lynne Truss's arse will one day be the stuff of legend.
What she, like Don Watson, like the Apostrophe Protection Society, like all socio-linguistic conservatives, fails to realise is that language and social interaction is constantly shifting. At a certain age of course you fall off the crest of the wave of change—the point is to take it with good grace and humour. But they think that they're members of the Last Great Good generation, the last ones who could be trusted with language and human communication, which is plainly insulting and I'll prove it with all kinds of deep red welts on her ample buttocks.
Theirs is the dim narrow purview, the appreciation of an apparent decline across one century or two, revealed as hopelessly mistaken by any broader look at language and society, which has certainly taken these hits and worse before, and been made stronger and more beautiful for it. I'm saying I ain't talking your granmama's language, cos your granmama's language didn't do what I need. Keep movin, Truss, or git ya fat butt off the sidewalk.
Joseph | 12 Nov 2005
Topographic view
The qualifier
Two weeks with the apple and the lone star (illustrated).
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