Abstract
In February 2015, Catherine Bennett published a piece called “Modern Tribes: the grammar pedant” in The Guardian Online. The article focused on so-called usage problems – instances of divided usage concerning grammar, vocabulary or spelling that many people have strong opinions about. (The previous sentence is a good example of such a usage problem: can you indeed end a sentence with a preposition, for instance?) The article itself was not very interesting in its own right: it dealt with all the “old chestnuts”, like less/fewer, disinterested/uninterested and of course the split infinitive. What was interesting, though, was that within a little over ten hours, 84 comments had come in. In the Bridging the Unbridgeable project, we are interested in new usage problems rather than the ones we have been reading about for around two hundred years. So I scoured the comments with great interest. I've already written about what I found in a post on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog: there were not many new or any very striking complaints, but what I do find of interest is that no-one mentioned the flat adverb. Does this mean that flat adverbs are no longer considered problematical today?
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