Quest: Good English Matters

Quest, the Queen's English Society's little quarterly journal arrived today. I curled up with it on the couch while thick snow drifted past the window, and I perused the latest thinking on whether spelling matters and what the papers say--a collection of disgraceful and unforgivable crimes against the English language. Writing for that little magazine must be intimidating. A writer would know that cohorts of self-anointed experts are waiting in their lairs ready to pounce. This must have a dampening effect. Was I ever aware that a cohort refers to a group, not one person. No, but I never had Latin, deprived child that I was. Do I ever use 'wonderful' to describe a movie that's here today and gone tomorrow? You bet, event though it's entirely detached from its original meaning. I was fascinated (to use fascinated here is to go way beyond its meaning) by the discussion of usage of children vs. kids. I'm with Adrian Williams when he says kids give the impression of a "rumbustious band of great little guys, rarin' to go.... Kids are classless...but children are just stuffy and middle class." So, if you want to avoid sounding stuffy, you'd better go with kids.