Dear Mr. Simmonds

Today I submitted a response to an editorial published in The Student Review on the need to abolish or wage war against "corrupt" English. The author seemed very agitated at the use of fail as a noun. Poor guy. Here is my response, which I hope is included in the next issue.

Dear Mr. Simmonds,

A return to the noblest of English indeed! Unfortunately such linguistic corruption is nothing new and part-of-speech conversion is but a small fraction of the issue though I will keep this discussion limited to the issue of part-of-speech conversion for sake of length. We language prescriptivists have a great share of work cut out for us in such an endeavor.

You would not believe the number of occasions that I have heard the nouns access, host, mail, dress and even switch used as verbs. This verbification, it seems, will not cease! Is it really too difficult to say, “I do not have access” instead of “I can not access” or even worse “I can’t access”? For heaven sakes! This is English! We do not affix our negative particles! There is little as dreadful as agglutination (though this is a separate issue). Is it so difficult to let our nouns and verbs remain separate? Is it too difficult to remember that mail is something we send, not something that we do? It is not! I assert that this is not a function of difficulty but rather laziness and lack of intellect. Sloppy speech is among the vilest of sins and is used among the vilest of people.

I am, however, running into some personal difficulty in the matter. I recently learned that sleep was not originally a verb but a noun and since I do enjoy using it as a verb I fear this makes me a hypocrite. I am unsure of how to resolve this. If you have any advice in the matter I gratefully welcome your response.

Sincerely,

Justin Stark
BYU Linguistics Major