You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
Once, there was a time in Jerusalem of brotherhood and peace: cultures and languages lived side by side and not one at the expense of the other.
Objections to verbification in English tend to be motivated by personal taste, not clarity. Verbed words are usually easily understood. When a word like 'friend' is declared not a verb, the problem isn't that it's confusing; it's that the protester finds it deeply annoying.
It comes from within to not be ashamed of our brothers and sisters who have accents.
How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.
I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?
The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
Republicans who criticize the use of two languages, I think, make a great mistake.
I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.
Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?
Make no mistake: one is not a better Quebecer because one speaks French. One is not less of a Quebecer because one speaks English. We all share the same rights.
I am grateful that the people of Telangana supported me when I spoke in the Andhra accent, just as much as the people of Andhra embraced my Telangana dialect.
