Post by Verbivore on Dec 17, 2023 2:12:10 GMT
Interesting. Certainly, all my ideas about the English language predate the 1980s so I would prefer: "The persons who dreamed up that organisational title might be naïve, ignorant, or jokesters." And I still strive to avoid the use of split infinitives and sentences ending with prepositions. As you see, sentences beginning with conjunctions are fine.
in regard to the usage by Shakespeare, I keep reminding people that he was writing the speech of his characters and that says nothing about what he may or may not have thought was acceptable, let alone "correct", English.
My take on Shakespearean lexicon and spellings is that orthography was still immature: it was evolving, and kept / keeps doing so, for better or for worse(r!).
I was until about age 40 far more pedantic / doctrinaire than now. After tertiary studies (Communication Studies; Linguistics) my styles and standards – so much theory! – were influenced by the pragmatics (time, cost, technical limitations …) of Real World writing, printing, and publishing, particularly in news and educational streams.
In column-layout publications (e.g. traditional hard-copy newspapers) – especially before the advent of digital typesetting – one was constrained by narrow columns that required compromise solutions. It was too easy to make awkward and ugly hyphened breaks so, e.g., the use of a less might be needed to fit where fewer wouldn’t (the gods forbid! lol) or an infinitive might need to be split; that’s what copyeditors did – they made the copy fit. Of course, today with digital typesetting / page layout tools one can ‘force it or fake it’ to accommodate either an excess of text or awkward spacing / breaking / hyphenation. Perhaps many people know and don’t care. Or don’t know so can't care. After all, other folk have their lives to live in their own bubbles. I’m sure they’d find mine boring.