Order, order!

Words come in and out of the language all the time -- or they change their meaning, sometimes quite suddenly, sometimes more gradually. But the point is that English is an adaptable language, one based to a considerable extent on street usage, merchants and ordinary social discourse. All attempts to police it too tightly are doomed to fail. In short, usage is king.

That's not to say that there are no rules at all. All languages require grammar, to identify the rules that govern usage. Without any rules, we couldn't understand each other, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

For instance, English places a particular importance on word order, more so than many other languages. (The other extreme, where word order does not matter so much because case-ending inflections indicate the grammatical function words, is Latin.)

Take this sentence: I went to the shops. Simple. Now jumble the word order: to went I shops the. Well, you might just about figure it out but you'd know that whatever it is, it isn't any kind of standard English. It's pidgin at best. So saying that rules don't matter because "everyone knows what I mean" is an argument that gets you so far, but only so far.


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