*Lush* life > *luxe* life?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Jan 30 04:01:09 UTC 2008


At 9:59 PM -0500 1/29/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>And tyhat's not even strange. What's strange is something like the
>shift of the seemingly-immutable word-order of strings like "I decided
>_not to go_" to "I decided _to not go_," which didn't even have a
>prescriptive rule against it, in my lost youth. This is not to say
>that there's a prescriptive rule against it these days. I don't know.
>But if *I* were writing a prescriptive grammar, there certainly would
>be, even though I know that it's already been a lost cause for
>dekkids. :-)
>
Well, there is that much beloved prescriptive rule against splitting
infinitives, whether it's a case of deciding to not go or of
accepting a mission to boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before...

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list