Raffaella Zanuttini is a professor of linguistics at Yale University and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
We consistently find people who decry change and fear it will bring about the demise of English as we know it. But it’s totally harmless and offers us a window on the complex system that underlies our knowledge of language.
We should embrace the fact that there’s no single recipe for English. Making fun of people for replacing “ask” with “aks,” or for frequently using double negatives just makes you look like the unsophisticated one.