Baron’s Laws of English Usage*
Baron’s First Law, or, the law of Don’t tread on me: Everyone wants to be correct, but nobody wants to be corrected. It’s a free country, you can't tell me what to do.
Baron’s Second Law, or, the law of shutting the barn door: When someone complains about a language innovation, it’s already too late to do anything about it.
Baron’s Third Law, or, the law of inevitable self-incrimination: When someone complains about a change in the language, you'll find them committing the very sin they rail against.
But wait, there’s more—
- The uncertainty principle: When it comes to language, everyone knows the difference between right and wrong, or good and bad, or standard and nonstandard, they just don't agree on what that difference is.
- The uncertainty principle times two: Language gurus disagree about correctness even more than everybody else, and they do it louder.
- The law of Everyone’s a critic: For every usage critic watching your grammar, there’s someone watching their grammar, and someone watching their grammar, and so on ad infinitum, etcetera, and di dah di dah di dah.
- The law of, If I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich? Language critics refuse to listen to one another because, “It’s a free country, you can't tell me what to do.”
- The law of increasing entropy, or, History repeats itself: Even if we accept a language critic’s recommendation, we’re likely to misunderstand them and produce yet another error for the critics to get exercised over.
- The law of enlightened self-interest: Language critics want us to misunderstand what they say so we produce yet another error and they can stay in business.
- The relativity principle, or You like it, it likes you: Like the weather, everyone’s got something to say about the English language, which makes it as hard to distinguish between language fact from fiction as it is to distinguish between science fact and fiction, between news and fake news, or between Coke and Pepsi.
- The principle of recurring punctuation: No matter how often I try to duck the issue and get on to topics that are really interesting, people still want to know where to put their commas. But that’s okay, because, according to...
- ...The law of the proper pronoun: For language, as for everything else, it doesn’t matter what you know but who you know. Or is it whom?
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*because it's time to put these all in one place.
