David Crystal weblog

David Crystal has a weblog: DCBlog, I discovered from Luxus Linguae.

It was at Broadcasting House in London, round about 1980. I was asked to talk about language to a managerial seminar series, and I started by asking them why there had been no blockbuster… etc. The answers went roughly along these lines. People remembered language work from their school days. It was dull, boring, dry as dust. Parsing. Split infinitives. Tenses. Being told off for mispronouncing something. Iambic pentameters. … I looked around the room. From their age, these were almost all people who had been through the prescriptive mill. They were probably the last generation of people to do so. They had never been enthused about language.

(On TV language blockbusters - not)

One of his reasons for blogging was one of mine - to save answering the same question many times. Not that that explains many of my posts.