Trudgill in Vocabula

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 04:30 PM 6/16/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>...
>That a U.S. presidential candidate can cry Is our children learning, an
>admired basketball star can use the word conversate, a well-known college
>professor
>can say vociferous when he means voracious, and another can scold a student
>for using the word juggernaut because she believes it means jigaboo is
>disturbing. The Vocabula Review strives to combat the degradation of our
>language.

"Conversate" is a perfectly good back-formation from "conversation" and is
common in the Black English-speaking community (and spreading to other
speech communities as well).  To lump it together with inept rhetorical
style and (admittedly) confused lexical items is hardly to make a case for
the degradation of "our" language.

BTW, who _are_ the owners of "our" language?