Re: observable language change - "off of" makes it to the NY Times

On Aug 14, 7:39 am, Adam Funk <a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-08-14, benli...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 14, 12:40 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
If this is correct then OED, Haralan and Ross are guilty of
misinformation. It seems that even contemporaneously with
Shakespeare, there were attempts to edit this solecism out of his
texts.

If you extend "contemporaneously" to include fifty years after his
death....

...and if you assume that subsquent modifications to a text must be
corrections or improvements --- never corruptions.

Just as you studiously avoid actual analysis of your disapprovals, you
will want to avoid looking even fleetingly at the vastness of
Shakespeare textual studies, where thousands of things are edited in,
edited out, and completely rewritten for good reasons, bad reasons and
no apparent reason at all. (OED notes a 1594 text with "fall off on a
tree"!) No, better to imagine that the Language Police were on the
job in the 17th century, saving poor Will from his "solecism".

(Sometimes I wonder if standardized spelling is overrated. The Early
Modern English writers didn't need it.)

And now that you have "solecism" in your right hand and "barbarism" in
your left, you could set up your own Usage Blog. Pilgrims would flock
to hear your judgments,linguists wouldn't bother you, and you could
get ahead with your work on the long-sought Panini-Fidditch Synthesis.

Harry Potter?

That would be the -- rather unlikely -- Quirk-Fidditch Synthesis.
.

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