rone wrote: >Jeff Gibbons writes: > Language is a living thing, how can one judge it? > >Man, i hate you "language is a living thing" people. Language is most >certainly a living thing, but would you rather it were a vertebrate or >a fungus? > > > Rather? IDK. Words are pretty clearly fungal, though. They growing in the dark places and different ones make different people different degrees of sick. You can make your own, but that doesn't mean anyone will enjoy them. Vertebrate or not, however, some evolutionary process is inevitable. Like it or not, and I mostly don't like it, the evolution of American English seems bent toward ease of use and not precision.