/nuz baɪts/
Not a wire news service but still more reliable than most newspapers.
Millennials Are Killing
an Amount of
Grammatical Things
Millennials are regularly accused of “killing” things by simply choosing not to spend their time or money on them—napkins, bar soap, fabric softener, golf, the NFL, sitcoms, beer, cereal, Applebee’s, Hooters, Home Depot, Sears, Macy’s, oil, diamonds, marriage, democracy, the American dream, etc. Anthropological research—conducted largely by linguists who couldn’t find more relevant work—has shown that most of those things are mere cultural byproducts whose popularity one could expect to wax and wane over the generations.
However, serially monogamous life partners Les A. Mount & F. Ewer have been documenting the damage done by 20-somethings to language. Millennials have completed the grammaticalization of dude into a full-fledged pronoun without any sociolinguistic constraints. And while it probably isn’t actually their fault, they’ve also cemented the alleged “acceptability” of positive anymore. But their greatest act of murder most foul, according to Gen-Xers Mount and Ewer, has been to kill the mass/count distinction.
An amount of people—particularly among radical descriptivists—have argued that less grammar rules in language will benefit so much people that several times more losses in subtle distinctions would be a small price to pay. Of course, not only do prescriptivists and native speakers disagree, but so does anyone—even linguists—with any sense of decency.
