Attitudes to Language

As a teacher of English, you may have been in the situation where a young student says to you, "you should never begin a sentence with a conjunction". And, you are impressed that the student knows what a conjunction is. But, you probe the student further and you ask her why and how she knows this "fact". She responds that her 5th grade teacher told her this. Such prescriptivist views, even where little understood, are...

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