Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

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.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

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.

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