I was listening to an interview of an author who spoke Oxbridge English, oh so posh, in elevated discourse and so on. Suddenly I heard, “…I wish I was. I wil try and do ….” such and such. “I wish I was” and “try AND…”! The language will never recover and we will sink into mutual intelligibility within our life times. BTW, Fowler has a very nice write up on this under “try”, including a nice distinction in the two common uses of the word “colloquial”.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
