On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, magical truthsaying bastard roney! wrote: #Think of all the words that kids use that make you stop and say, "What?" # #I think it is possible that language would drift just as much in #Dragaera as it does here; long lives would just mean that people are #still around to remember when "bad" meant "bad", "good", then "bad" #again. That lexical (vocabulary) process has been vastly accelerated by mass media, which do not exist in the Empire except for the printing press, which for reasons of speed, reach, and conservatism (in the uses we've seen of it) is not likely to have such an effect. And what broadcast media do with this lexical process doesn't seem to apply to sound or syntax, at least not to anything near the same extent. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel