Quote Originally Posted by jsrnephdoc View Post
...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.