The folly of preserving English in aspic

I hadn't heard that someone had been proposing an English equivalent of the Academie Francaise (excuse lack of French characters). This is folly and we've been here before: "Samuel Johnson,... Ruminating on the nine years he had spent writing the first proper English dictionary, ... recalled how he had set out 'to fix our language'. But he had found that this was folly: language was in a constant state of lively mutability and could not be 'embalmed'."

Indeed, and just like we insular Brits failed to look at the many successful governments around the world that do PR, we also fail to look at how such things fail; the French Academy tends to look like a boy with a finger in the dyke. It has signally failed to push back the tide of Anglicism and various other 'changes' and it will ever be so. The point about a living language is that it adapts and changes. Dead things don't change. Language 'belongs' to the whole linguistic community that uses it. Acceptable usage is an ongoing negotiation combining judgements about euphony, image, usefulness, as well as exhibiting the tensions along lines of power and solidarity, culture and subculture, differentiation and assimilation. That is an unstable mix even before you factor in technological, social and political changes that are the inevitable reflexes of living in a dynamic world.

Most judgements we tend to hear decrying 'bad English' reveal very little more than our own social situation, prejudices and grabs for power ...

The folly of preserving English in aspic | Science | The Guardian