Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.