He’s dyslexic?
@Jeruba, r u serious?
“Moving back into the eighteenth century, we find the puristic movement at its height. Utterances of dismay and disgust at the state of the language followed one another thick and fast, expressed with far greater urgency than we normally find today. Famous outbursts included one in 1710 by Jonathan Swift. Writing in the Tatler, he launched an attack on the condition of English. He followed this up two years later with a letter to the Lord Treasurer urging the formation of an academy to regulate language usage, since even the best authors of the age, in his opinion, committed ‘many gross improprieties which . . . ought to be discarded’. In 1755, Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary of the English language was published. He stated in the preface that ‘Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration’, urging that ‘we retard what we cannot repel, that we
palliate what we cannot cure’. In 1762, Robert Lowth, Bishop of London, complained that ‘the English Language hath been much cultivated during the last 200 years . . . but . . . it hath made no advances in Grammatical accuracy’. He himself attempted to lay down ‘rules’ of good usage, because ‘our best Authors for want of some rudiments of this type have sometimes fallen into mistakes, and been guilty of palpable error in point of Grammar.’
In short, expressions of disgust about language, and proposals for remedying the situation, were at their height in the eighteenth century.”
—Language change: progress or decay?
Was the archaic language of the aforementioned old farts superior to today’s “best” usage?