I recently wrote a letter of explanation to a board of members who oversee the disbursement of financial aid to university students. Not knowing their names / gender / position / titles, I used the phrase, "To whom it may concern:". I

"Standard" and "non-standard" dialects/languages are each complete systems and equally complex with their own rules of syntax, morphology etc. There is no correlation between intelligence and the language faculty. Whilst

But beyond the ivory towers, the main question was: why do most of the general public believe that those who do not use the standard dialect are unintelligent? I expect their reasoning goes something like this: Anyone who does not grasp what he

<It is all-pervading and hardly surprising since it results from people having invested a lot of time in learning what they believe to be correct .> Or that which they insist on being accepted as the only correct form, even though they know

I think everybody code-switches to some degree, as long as there is some sort of reason to do so in their society. It doesn't mean they use two dialects just as a bilingual uses two languages, because people often respond to dialect as if it

As Mr P suggests, the only way forward is to note the context in each case. Dictionaries cannot provide information on all the overtones and subtleties associated with a word. As to whether all native English speakers mean the same thing by the

Whilst it may be true that on the whole the amount of education a person receives is proportional to the level of his intelligence, the corollary, that the level of ones intelligience is proportional to the education one has received, is not true.

You have a bit of a problem because whichever you choose may not meet with the approval of whoever reads your statement! Dashes seem to be used more now than they were; I know I use them more than I used to On balance I would say the second looks

<Giving the -ing form a new name will only confuse people.> Coclusion: better the confusion you know? Rather: if people are not confused we do not want to confuse them and if people are already confused we do not want to add to their

Sounds like just another desire to replace one convention with another. Giving the -ing form a new name will only confuse people.