But even if what you say was technically true, I think you're just pissing into the wind here. In cases like this, proper usage is determined by actual usage. Anything else is just pedantry.
No, actual usage can vary widely, so widely that you may have no idea what a phrase spoken in local, coloquial English in another part of the world even means without a translation.
Yes.
So?
You say that as if you think it disproves my argument, but it doesn't.
All it proves is that proper usage varies from place to place and from group to group. And that you want to deny this fact by marginalizing other people's forms of speech as "local" and colloquial".
There will always be such a thing as "proper usage"...
If there is such a thing as "proper usage," then why did you put it in scare quotes?
...because scientific papers, legal documents, treaties, etc have to actually mean what they say, and there cannot be possiblity of confusion or misinterpretation. There is an infamous case where a missing comma in a legal agreement cost a company millions of dollars because a clause that was meant to exclude something included it instead.
What you're privileging here as "proper usage" is just the sociolect of the professional middle-class. Hence, your examples: scientific papers, legal documents, treaties.
And the sociolect of the professional middle class is only seen as "proper usage" because people have been taught to see it that way--by members of the professional middle class, who privilege their own form of speech and writing at the expense of others.
What constitutes "proper usage" is determined, ultimately, by power. As the old saying goes: a language is a dialect with an army.
Sometimes that power comes in the form of sheer weight of numbers, and sometimes it comes in other, more institutional forms.
One of the best historical illustrations of this fact is Italian. What people nowadays call "Standard Italian"--that is to say, "proper" Italian--was spoken by less than 10 per cent of Italians before the
Risorgimento. Once Italy was unified under Piedmontese rule, the new government imposed the Tuscan language on the rest of the country, called it "Italian," and promoted it as "proper" usage. The other languages of Italy were demoted to the status of mere "dialects."
This doesn't mean you are obligated to speak in legalese or scientific jargon, you are free to speak and write however you wish, and as long at it's appropriate to the listener or reader, fine.
How generous of you.
But there will always be an actual, factual standard. We deviate from that at our pleasure, but the standard exists.
Only in your imagination, and in the imaginations of others.
And only because certain groups of people
want their form of speech to be regarded as the standard, for their own benefit.
Hell--I'm a
member of that group of people. I benefit greatly from having mastered the sociolect of the professional middle class. And in an educational setting, I demand that my students speak
my language, not theirs--because it's in my interest, and because I have the power to do so. I'm actually pretty tyrannical about it.
The fact that it's also in
their interest--the fact that they'll never be allowed to join the professional bourgeoisie unless they can speak the sociolect of that highly exclusive class--is just icing on the cake.
And I don't bullshit myself about what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it.
