“As for slang, I’m all for it! I don’t know how I ever did without to flame (protest self-righteously), to dis (express disrespect for), and to blow off (dismiss an obligation), and there are thousands of now-unexceptionable English words like clever, fun, sham, banter, mob, and stingy that began life as slang. It is especially hypocritical to oppose linguistic innovations reflexively and at the same time to decry the loss of distinctions like lie versus lay on the pretext of preserving expressive power. Vehicles for expressing thought are being created far more quickly than they are being lost.”—Steven Pinker,” Grammar Puss: the fallacies of the language mavens.”
http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~bakovic/camba_files/misc/ll/grammar_puss.html
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