This begs the question* whether you want the lemmings to understand you. One theory of language, gotten more or less from Strunk and White's Elements of Style, is that the most important feature of language is its transparency to the underlying thoughts. Bad language breaks the transparency, reminds you that you are reading and not simply thinking the thoughts of the author, who should also usually be invisible. Bad writing calls attention to itself and to the author, whereas good writing guides the thoughts of the reader unnoticeably. For Strunk and White, it seems that all rules of writing follow this principle, and it seems to be the right way to think about language. So, conventions, even when somewhat inaccurate, are important in that they are often more transparent, and the reader does not get stuck on them.
Anyway, a case in point of lemmings is that once Wayne Hendrickson himself suggested that the term anomalous be decommissioned in favor of "resonant." I don't hear any non-lemmings jumping on that bandwagon... JPK *Is this the right use of "beg the question?" On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Phoebe Rice <pr...@uchicago.edu> wrote: >> >>> Can I be dogmatic about this ? >> >>I wish you could, but I don't think so, because even though those >>sources call it that, others don't. I agree with your thinking, but >>usage is usage. > > And 10,000 lemmings can't be wrong? -- ******************************************* Jacob Pearson Keller Northwestern University Medical Scientist Training Program email: j-kell...@northwestern.edu *******************************************
