Jeau - "Myself, I walk the line..."

Me too, though my toe tends to creep over into the living language playground more often than not. Nice breakdown of the differences between being a lexical elitist and a linguists. I'm all for creative use and appropriation of language, I just prefer to know what rules I'm breaking and original meanings as well. Otherwise I may end up adding an unintentional meaning or layer of meaning which may distort what I'm actually trying to communicate.

>>>>>>>>As a lexical elitist, I would argue that everyone who hears this quote and has a shred of an education instantly thinks of Shakespeare.<<<<<<<'

Of course! But I should think any educated person would as well realize when I said, "Wherefore art thou, Heather?" that I was *not* asking *why* she was a Capulet.

A more recent example concerns the phrase "the road less traveled." Many people associate the phrase with the poet Robert Frost (-though some will associate with a book by M. Scott Peck), and that is the line's source, but those who know the *poem* know that often in in common usage "I took the road less travelled by" has taken on a meaning that Frost didn't intend. (The poet had no objection to the road he *didn't* take and wished that he could take that one as well; he was sorry that he could not travel both.) Yet when someone says "I took the road less travelled" in conversation, it is to be expected that people will take it the way people tend to take it now and not as Frost intended, and this goes even for those who know and love Frost.

And now a personal example. I was seeing a therapist a few years back and he knew that I loved jazz, as did he. Once when he was telling me to cool my jets about a stormy work relationship and he said, "Do nothing till you hear from me." Duke Ellington made that song famous. The lyric of the song was not at all about a therapist / patient relationship, but the line was perfect for the occassion because a) I got his point, and b) the way he expressed it was through an idiom we both appreciated. (There are even games of conversing only in song lyrics---great latitude is allowed in how they may be used so long as the line used is actual.)

This is one of the fun things about reading!