Why aren't colons optional?

[Stefan Nobis]

Courageous <jkraska at san.rr.com> writes:

> Ever pick up the phone and say "It's me"?. This is incorrect. In modern

You mix spoken language and written language. Those are two quite different
worlds! Spoken language is for the moment -- if you are understood, everything
is ok and if not, you can be asked what you meant.

But written language is another story. Somebody read what you wrote and he has
no possibility to ask you immediatly if he does not understand what you
wrote. So you have to be more exact and more clear in what you write.

Think about book written today and read in 200 years. If your write as you
speak, there are very good chances that many people don't understand what you
wrote.

> Language is dynamic. The people determine it's correctness, not a few
> privileged folks in an ivory tower.

Yes, lanugage is dynamic. But it is not that dynamic. The main part is
understanding. And if two persons want to understand each other, they have to
use the same language -- so there is a little bit dynamic (sometime new words,
sometimes a new meaning for an old word), but most of the time, the language
is quite static (with only a very little bit of training i'm able to
understand texts 400 years old and older). Languages are dynamic over the
centuries.

Most people complaining about those folks in an ivory tower are people who
don't care about their language and people who are not very good in their
language.

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.