This is how it is. It isn't how it needs to be. There was no law till a minority imposed it. You may not like all the laws, and they may get broken quite a lot, but they are still there, and only get changed when the minority in charge decide to change them.
We could, of course, abandon prescriptive law and allow the consensus to decide what is a crime and what isn't. I fancy that idea might appeal to you rather more than to me; I don't believe it would be a good idea. Why is it supposed to be an unalterable law of nature when applied to that other unnatural creation of humanity, language? Why are people always trying to improve and repair cars and computers? Why not simply let them develop naturally into heaps of useless plastic and metal? Why try to sharpen a knife? It'll only get blunt again, so that's obviously what it's supposed to do and our preference for sharp knives is merely a personal quirk.
I don't approve of entropy. In most cases there's not a lot people can do about it. In this case there is something that people can do about it, and I think they should, and I'll go on thinking they should.
BBC RP didn't fail; it was deliberately abandoned, under entropic pressure. It would be harder to re-establish now (and as it happens, I don't have any quarrel with regional accents as long as they remain broadly comprehensible--I can stand the guy on the advert saying "The Co-op, gid with fid" if I have to) but not impossible.
Fatalism in the face of remediable decay is just not something I can be comfy with. Which probably means I'll spend my life railing against the tide till nobody can understand me any more, or I die, whichever is the sooner.
no subject
We could, of course, abandon prescriptive law and allow the consensus to decide what is a crime and what isn't. I fancy that idea might appeal to you rather more than to me; I don't believe it would be a good idea. Why is it supposed to be an unalterable law of nature when applied to that other unnatural creation of humanity, language? Why are people always trying to improve and repair cars and computers? Why not simply let them develop naturally into heaps of useless plastic and metal? Why try to sharpen a knife? It'll only get blunt again, so that's obviously what it's supposed to do and our preference for sharp knives is merely a personal quirk.
I don't approve of entropy. In most cases there's not a lot people can do about it. In this case there is something that people can do about it, and I think they should, and I'll go on thinking they should.
BBC RP didn't fail; it was deliberately abandoned, under entropic pressure. It would be harder to re-establish now (and as it happens, I don't have any quarrel with regional accents as long as they remain broadly comprehensible--I can stand the guy on the advert saying "The Co-op, gid with fid" if I have to) but not impossible.
Fatalism in the face of remediable decay is just not something I can be comfy with. Which probably means I'll spend my life railing against the tide till nobody can understand me any more, or I die, whichever is the sooner.