Adulteration? No, not really. I don't want to say that modern day English teachers and such are *intolerant* (because that
word has come to be used in disgusting ways in the last several years), but a lot of linguistics professors would consider them ignorant, or at least unable to understand some basic truths of language (one of them being that language always changes). I think it was about half a millenium ago that European courts started dictating what the official version of a region's language should sound like, but no authority can fully clamp down a language's tendency to change as much as they'd often like. We still hear about split infinitives, although that's really a holdover from Latin, where you really couldn't have them (why can't we say "to boldly go where no man has gone before"?). To determine if speech is correct, linguists don't look in grammar books--they ask native speakers if you can say something in the language. For instance, in English, a native speaker might tell you you can't say "The die here night dog tomorrow" but that they can definitely understand "I ain't doing no work never, even if to half die would be my punishment fer it!" Who are you going to trust? I'm not saying linguists should be our priests, but they seem to try to be more realistic and objective than dictating language Nazis (prescriptive people, whereas linguists like to call themselves descriptive). People in the US have gotten hung up over things like black English, even when many "versions" of black English are grammatically consistent and regularly understood by those who speak them (they know the difference between "he goin' down there" and "he be goin' down there"). Anyone familiar with rapidly evolving technology who disagrees with accepting changing language should take a step back and look at the big picture: change is a fact of life. Otherwise it wouldn't really be life, would it?
http://www.blackvoicenews.com/print.php?sid=1014 http://www.umass.edu/synergy/fall98/ebonics3.html
