Simple Runner wrote:
Good: let's use conventional ignorance as the standard.
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Monsieur, all grammar books and dictionaries eventually catch up to the living language, not matter how low-brow you think it is or how based in actual ignorance it is. We've intentionally and unintentionally turned many things on their heads and have become quite used to their being upside down.
No modern grammars insist any more on the split infinitive for the simple reason that the hoi polloi, right along with some pretty damn good authors, started splitting the hell out of them.
Again, you miss the point (willfully, because you care more about winning than the truth?), which is that in accepting this new usage, which is actually born out of ignorance of the original meaning of the phrase, we actually LOSE something useful. We already have at least two perfectly good terms to deploy when we want to say someone or something inadvertently "raises" or "provokes" a particular question; what we (still) need is an economical way to say that someone is using spurious logic in assuming the very thing he/she purports to be explaining (e.g. "War can be explained by man's innate tendency for violence, and we know that humans are innately violent because of the widespread prevalence of war.")
Why can't more people (guys on the internet, really) just say "I was wrong, and now have learned something"? Must they always insist on having their noses rubbed in it first (before skulking off to get still more things wrong, under new ostensibly funny and/or cryptic usernames)?