This is all the more worthy of note because any time anyone has succeeded in forcing ‘improvements’ on the English language in an authoritarian, imposed sort of way, it’s almost always made things worse. Think about the utterly unnecessary introduction of the letter ‘b’ into words like ‘debt’ and ‘doubt’, not added to give English teachers extra words to add on spelling tests (though it may seem that way) but in order to give the English words a closer resemblance to their Latin roots. The desire to make English resemble Latin – a language with which it does not have all that much in common grammatically – also gives us the commandment not to split infinitives, which, if obeyed, would have ruined the opening of Star Trek. Like Einstein’s comment on genius – “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid” – English has often suffered for not being Latin.