Posted by Mike Dennis on August 12, 2008 at 06:35:37 user MTD.
In Reply to: Re: English (was Bad Spelling) posted by Robert Hill on August 11, 2008 at 16:52:57:
Well you do learn something new every day! This makes me sound like I am trying to stir things up, but I have never come across the term before. I did check on Google when it first came up and was surprised by the number of entries. As an example the excellent 'The English Language' by Robert Burchfiled devotes a whole chapter to dispersed forms of English with no reference to the term (or in the lengthy afterword by the current editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.) I suppose that what comes of studying language structure and variants in academia rather than the real world!