Nature versus nurtured by force.
True, language is an organic, untameable product of human culture, and all the style guides in the world can’t stop the lolcats from hazzing their cheezburgers if thousands of people want them to. But by the same token, subliterate Web chatterers are unlikely to overthrow standard English anytime soon. Curiously, people who cite the “organic” nature of language in decrying standardization never consider that standardization might itself be an organic process—that the relative stability of spelling and grammar conventions in the twentieth century as opposed to the eighteenth, the eighteenth as opposed to the sixteenth, etc., might have evolved communally and naturally and not through a conspiracy of grammar scolds.
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