Almond specializes in simple, tuneful melodies that draw on the rhythms of informal speech.
Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech.
Though "whom" is pompous in short questions and relative clauses, it is a natural choice in certain other circumstances, even in informal speech and writing.
Not surprisingly, the result is a written language that records informal speech rather than writing that can stand as an edited genre of its own.
For example, all forms of discrimination against "untouchables" (now usually referred to in administrative language as "scheduled castes" and in informal speech as "Dalits") are forbidden, although it has been impossible to enforce the law in every case.
No self-respecting prescriptivist would sanction these, but from analyses of informal speech recorded in many parts of the United States, descriptive linguists have identified several restrictions on this deletion.
And e-mail more closely resembles speech than writing because, like informal speech, e-mail is usually constructed on the fly, with little preplanning and even less post-editing.
The pungent reaction baffled linguists, who had long appreciated and begun to seriously study the "languageness" of Black English and other informal speech variants, such as Jamaican Patois, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole.
In the dictionary's "usage notes," for example, traditional distinctions between "who" and "whom" are noted, but it is also suggested that such distinctions tend to become irrelevant in informal speech.
