RE: Letters

Hi All,

 There are two very important things that most people tend to overlook 
about language.

1) Language is always changing. Words that were used 1 or 2 centuries 
might be deprecated or have lost there original meaning. An example is 
the word "aweful" (it used to mean something that was full of AWE, but 
today it represent something that is ugly, dicusting etc...) 

Another, interesting fact is that many words are added to the English 
language every year. ("Many" might be an under statement! As we use 50% 
more words then Shakespeare used in his time!)

2) The structure of many language (i.e. spelling and grammar) is 
illogical. For example French has a tremendous amount of grammatical 
rules and exception to those rules which makes writting very painful and 
somewhat time consuming!

 Now, these two point don't, unfortunatly, give us the right to massacre 
the language when writing e-mails or web page. The same standards of 
quality should be maintained wether your writing a letter with pen & 
paper, a typewriter or a word processor. But we must keep in mind, 
especially, in an open forum like this one that people from many 
different areas of the world are communicating with each other (of which 
English might not be primary language.) As such a little understanding 
and patience is important to the readers of any such message. 

 All this to say that even though a message might not be "correct", as 
long as it is understandable by all parties envolved then the  language 
and the medium used have served their primary goal. That of allowing 
people to communicate and share ideas.

Regards-
David

<phobos23(at)hotmail.com>


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