by Matthew Sitman
On June 30, the Queen's English Society, "committed to protecting the language from declining standards," came to an end. VR Narayanswami applauds the demise of the language police:
What detractors of prescriptivism object to is the attempt by individuals to impose artificial and arbitrary rules on usage. A rule should be seen as a codification of existing practice. Grammarians point out that prescriptivists create such controversies by trying to fit English structure on to a Procrustean bed of Latin grammar. The history of English shows that language changes under the influence of good writers and speakers, not of academies of the French model.
