The Economist bemoans the decline of the English Language
My comment was this:
In America, we have the distinct disadvantage of the creeping use of Republicanese, a dialect that is doing to our language what a parasite creeping vine does to an oak tree: surrounds it, squeezes it, and then chokes the life out of it.
E.g.: "Republicanese has word's made into plurals with an apostrophe at random. The same word can be made into a plural without the apostrophe, to. It works for you and I as well as non-native speaker's. To be fluent in Republicanese, the trick for you and I would be to pretend we have there education level, and that no one else was graduated beyond the third grade. With they're penchant for reducing education budgets, and therefore loosing qualified teacher's, the Republican Party does go a long way toward achieving there goal."
Link to the article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/02/johnson-language-anxieties
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It hurts to see you doing this, even though I know you know much better!
I HATE what Republicanese is doing to our beautiful language.
I have a friend who is a theoretical linguist. She is a Spaniard. She is fascinated by my diction and vocabulary. Because I come from an area of Mexico/Texas that at one point, and for a brief time, called itself "The Republic of the Rio Grande". An area that is now divided between the sovereign states of Texas, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila de Zaragoza.
My Spanish accent and vocabulary is heavily influenced by Galician; a Spanish dialect that is no longer the dominant tongue in Spain. But the vocabulary is steeped in Nahuatl; the native tongue of the Mexica (Aztec).
Yet, in all this mixture, I can still read and understand the "Cantares del Mio Cid"; a poem written in Castilian over one thousand years ago.
Whereas English speakers have difficulty understanding Shakespeare from a mere five centuries ago.
It is a puzzle, but it points to the rapid evolution of English and the relative stagnation of Spanish.
Nevertheless, Spanish is evolving as well, and much faster than it has previously done.
On my latest visits to Mexico, after an absence of close to 40 years, I was shocked! Shocked! to be addressed by the familiar tu, instead of the expected 'Usted', by mere waiters.
It was enough to make me clutch my pearls! Oh, my!
But life goes on, I suppose, and people find a way to communicate, even if they have to modify the language to do so.
How long ago was it, that emoticons didn't exist as part of our discourse?
I recalled the grave and the cross and your joke about "literally dying." But I guess it does mean "goodnight"
I never understood THIS: 
"A topologist is a man who doesn't know the difference between a coffee up and a doughnut. mathematics."
Glad I asked. I've asked before but no one responded.
