Sporran and Shoe Color

[OC Richard]

Spoken like a true Scotsman, “outwith” a preposition almost exclusively used in Scotland.

Or somebody from the USA whose father was a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile, who grew up using a chaotic mix of British and US spellings, and has been around Scots my whole life.

This stuff has been exacerbated by my wife and I watching English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Australian television almost exclusively, and inevitably picking up words, phrases, pronunciations, etc along the way.

This comes as a complete surprise to someone who always regarded American people as free thinkers never inhibited about doing things their own way. And so to find them unquestioningly following tradition in this way seems contrary to an otherwise national character.

If you knew my father you would understand how being an uninhibited free thinker and unquestionably following tradition could seamlessly coexist.

[jsrnephdoc]

If you knew my father you would understand how being an uninhibited free thinker and unquestionably following tradition could seamlessly coexist.

I'll trump (playing card, not political reference) that.

If you knew my PARENTS, you might appreciate how one absolutely rigid parent and an ultimate free thinker partner could endure, let alone celebrate 5½ decades together, sometimes opining entirely opposing positions, yet always addressing each other in Bobby Burns's term of endearment (my "JO") in place of names, interchangeably "Jo" and "Jo Jo."

[OC Richard]

...my mom, who championed equally "prescriptive" and "descriptive" grammar, and of course from there to the 21st century practice of accepting whatever one finds in a cursory web search rather than learned from a real authority...

It's interesting how English went from the extremely creative flexible period of Shakespeare, when nouns can be used as verbs, when as you were composing a sentence you could throw in a French or Latin word if it came to mind more readily than an English one, etc etc to a period when scholars attempted to improve English by forcing it into the straightjacket of Latin grammar rules and attempted to "fix" English into an artificial form which would never evolve.

That prescriptive period didn't last, couldn't last, because that's not how language works. New words come in, old words cease to be used, existing words shift their meanings, grammar changes, pronunciation changes etc etc.

Linguists have a saying "native speakers don't make mistakes" in other words everything generated by the native speakers of a language is part of the corpus of that language. Things that sound "right" to us today might have sounded "wrong" to somebody a generation ago, and something that sounds "wrong" to us today might be the "correct" usage a generation from now. No-one can stop the continual mutations that happen.