🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8200@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt) writes:
>Do a bunch of TV anchormen in blue shirts and blow-dried hair set
>the norms, or are they set by Harvard professors and columnists for
>_The New York Times_?  If Dan Rather started saying, "onliest," 
>whenever he meant, "only," would that change the norm?  

Since I am pretty well on your side of this argument, I hate to
tell you this. But it is because Dan rather and a great many
columnists for the New York Times (well, reporters, at any rate)
use "most" to mean "almost" that now most everyone does (not me,
except for purposes of illustration :-) .) I happen to regard
this as an innocuous change. A worse one is that the New York
Times usually contains at least a few sentences every day in
which the verb does not agree with the subject in number.
The most common case is that of sentences that begin with
"There is" or "there was," and then follow up with a list
of items, each of which is singular. (There is anger and
frustration in Sarajevo tonight.) But there are many other
cases as well. You can say the writers can't count from
one to two; or you can say that the plural form of "to be"
is gradually disappearing from English. The latter is a linguist's
type of description. In this case it's probably correct, even if it
may be regrettable.
-- 
Roger Greenwald
Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)