We’re word snobs (but maybe we shouldn’t be)

Do you organise or organize your notes?  Is it leaped or leapt?   I’ve often wondered how much we identify ourselves by the words we choose.  Does spelling give us a sense of national pride?  Is it important that we maintain traditional grammatical forms?  How are rules of grammar, vocabulary and spelling changing?

Being from Canada, I find myself amongst an unclear mixture of British and American influence.  I have a favourite musician and flavour of ice cream, but I haven’t initialised much investigation into why or attempted to standardise my rules.  I get irritated when I hear young people talk about what they’ve learned, where I’d learnt differently.  I’m bothered by advertisements for competitions that ask kids to color a picture and am skeptical of those who don’t care.  So I wonder, am I a hypocritical word snob?  Should I bother adhering to a set of arbitrary rules?  Maybe the way in which people speak and write is now changing again and I’m part of the past.  This led me to decide to investigate and question what’s currently happening with our language.

Coursetree is beginning a research project called “What’s the word?” and is kindly asking for your participation.  If you’re a native English speaker, we need you!  Please click here, take a few minutes to choose some words and help us out. Thanks a lot!  We’ll be in touch.