Guide to English Usage [antikvár]

Introduction Anyone who sets out to write A Guide to English Usage is faced with a formidable task. One dictionary defines usage as 'the customary manner of using a language or any of its forms, especially standard practice in a given language. This will serve very nicely as a definition, but it can be of only limited assistance to the compilers of a book on the subject. One of the chief difficulties confronting them is that usage is constantly chang-ing. What may have been unacceptable twenty years ago is now standard English. There is nothing particularly surprising in this: the English language, like everything else in this world, is constantly evolving and twenty years is quite long enough for somé slang terms and colloquialisms to achieve the status of respectability, and for others to altér their meaning or to fade away altogether. However, there is a real problem in dealing with words or phrases which are in somé sense borderline cases and have not yet become universally acceptable either because they are new or are being used in a new way. Thus the authors are constantly faced with a choice. Do they accept or reject? Is it their function to teli people what they ought to say or to describe what they do say? How is the written language to be distinguished from the spoken language?