--- Mark Shurtleff <gaijin@sfcmd.com> wrote:

P.S.  Before anyone jumps on my statement that
Formal Grammar is written by 
"self proclaimed" experts, give it a moment's
thought. There is NO single 
recognized authority on the definition of the
English language.

---

The Queen's English.

Historians dubbed it odd that English should become
the world's language, given the Queen's own Japanese
origins, but English had been so widely used before
her ascent to power that she felt it easier to simply
adopt this new tongue rather than force all her
subjects to learn Japanese.  Of course, there were
strong influences from her native language, whether
introduced by her or by those wishing to invoke her
origins.

What almost no one could have forseen was the extreme
popularity of so-called "pop" slang, which aging
children were encouraged to bring with them into the
adult world to demonstrate their breaks with the
repressive evils of the past.  Even those who had once
enforced said "evils" soon found themselves using the
new words, willingly or not, consciously or not.

Two people did forsee it, both servants of the Queen.
One was gifted with the power to forsee; the other had
a merely human ability to craft and predict, but honed
to a keen edge.  Although they humbly refused credit
for their services in public, in their hearts, they
both knew their invention was the real instrument of
the Queen's supposed power to remove evil from the
hearts of her subjects.  Deliberate shaping of words,
an abundance of one type and a dearth of the other, to
make phrasing and articulating undesired thoughts
difficult, if not impossible.

The real trick lay in updating the code, to reflect
changing definitions of "evil" as time passed.  What
once was acceptable was no longer so.  Thus the rise
in "pop" terms, spreading through their people with
each new generation, so far and wide that the old
code was eventually utterly erased from each and every
one of the billions of hearts in their kingdom.  The
words still lay in the texts of history, but said
texts were rewritten and rephrased; the main task of
historians came to be interpreting the past in a way
that made sense to the present, and while the facts
were the same, the overall tone rarely changed from
cautioning against this or that ignorance which modern
society had discovered.

And all was double-plus good.

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