Who Do You Work For?

Royal Rave wrote:

Hawthorne wrote:
Screw improper uses. We're writers. It's like Mistress Prairie makes up words because she's a Webster -- in all frankness, when it comes to language rules writers should be both the gaurdians and the worst offenders

Isn't that like robbing the bank you work for?

We don't work for language; language works for us. We work for our communities, our audiences, culture, and literature as an expression and an artform itself.

When non-writers change and shift language they do so with the bearing of their own mass-minds, they smooth over gaps left by previous changes, steal words from other languages, and produce hodgepodges for the pure utility of communication.

When we break the rules we do so because it's beautiful, because it gets our point across, because it gives new meaning or new bearing to the language--language is constantly growing and changing, predictably and unpredictably and as writers its almost a civic duty to constantly test its boundaries and either sand down the rough edges or limn them.