Quote:
Originally Posted by icanhardlyread
The first two, but especially the second one, seem to correlate with age quite a bit, which also makes sense intuitively: the longer you've been doing X, the harder you are going to fight someone telling you that X is wrong and to do Y instead.
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Thanks for your insightful comments as a linguist. The ferocity of many of the reactions to the initial post, most from "men of a certain age", does tend to support the correlation you mentioned. As a man of (more or less) that age myself, I have no problem in accepting that language changes and evolves, and when it does so in a direction that includes more and excludes less
(or "fewer", for the pedantic prescriptivists), that's a good thing, a change to be embraced. I've even managed to train myself to say "crewed" and "uncrewed" instead of the older gender-restricted versions.
