One of the things that troubles me about Ms. Easby is that I find myself in agreement with much of the core of what she says, but it gets lost in the arrogance, and the elitist image she projects. For instance when she says, "Fer chrissake, David Crystal is one of the leading academics in the world in the field of linguistics. He was not, however, 'my' professor as I did not study at Bangor. I quoted his definition in the interests of clarity." When one couples it with the other things she has said, it gets ignored as her attitude just causes folks to automatically assume she is being a pompous ass, when in fact she is correct. Had she simply laid out this man's cred's, when she used him as a cite, perhaps we wouldn't be arguing about her instead of the subject. It took me all of 90 seconds to go to Ask.com and pull up the following with regard to Mr. Crystal:

Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at the University of Wales, Bangor (UWB) and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor and part-time lecturer of linguistics at UWB. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, forensic linguistics, language death, ludic linguistics (or language play), English style, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL).

Crystal is the author, co-author, editor or translator of over 100 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987), the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Encyclopedia itself, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003). He has also edited literary works, and is Chair of the UK National Literary Association. He also has a strong line in books for the layman about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner. He hypothesises that globally English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard Spoken English (cf International English). In his 2004 book The Stories of English, a general history of the English language, he wrote of the value he sees in linguistic diversity and the according of respect to varieties of English generally considered "non-standard". His non-linguistic writing includes poems, plays and biography. A Roman Catholic by conviction, he has also written devotional poetry and articles.

From 2001 to 2006, he served as the Chairman of Crystal Reference Systems Limited, a provider of reference content and Internet search and advertising technology. The company's products are based upon the patented Global Data Model, a complex semantic network that Crystal devised in the early 1980s and was adapted for use on the Internet in the mid 1990s. After the company's acquisition, he remains on the board as its R&D director.

So it appears that Mr. Crystal is, indeed, an accomplished scholar, and Diane's assertion that he is one of the leading academics in the field is correct. His opinions would seem to be a very legitimate predicate to base one's own arguments on.

Diane, you have much to offer. But the "take no prisoners, you are all a bunch of idiots" approach just causes your legitimate points to be lost in the fog.

And I still don't care much for this recording.

Mick