Language Police

In this old David Foster Wallace article, he talks about the language police, whether they're providing a vital public service, or just being uptight.  This article was recommended by the Slate Culture Gabfest, and there's a lot of good stuff in here, so to avoid giving it short shrift, I'm going to disclaim that the following discussion addresses only one small facet of the issue, and ignores the utility of having multiple dialects.  

In one part, he mentions that "the notoriously liberal Webster's Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961 and included such terms as heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them."  In my view:

The word "heighth" seems totally invalid, I've never seen anyone using it, and if you use it yourself, its not a learned behavior, its just you being stupid.  And while it does communicate the intended meaning, it also unintentionally communicates that you're dumb.  Unintended communication seems like a form of mis-communication, which makes it safe to call "heighth" a crime.

"Irregardless" is nonsense, in that the user means the opposite of what they're literally saying, but at least enough people make that mistake that, if you do it yourself, you can just blame your parents.  The meaning is conveyed, and although it might communicate that the user was raised by trash, in this country (unlike the UK), most people don't admit to judging people by their parents, so I personally wouldn't hang someone over this word. 

This seems sort of like our country's approach to immigration:  the first wave that crosses the line gets treated like garbage, we do everything we can to get rid of that trash, or at least keep it confined to ghettos, but a few generations later, we start to accept the descendants into society and they slowly become assimilated.  Whoever is in power at the time conveniently overlooks the fact that they themselves are descended from immigrants, likewise, they forget that the English they speak now is descended from what once was considered improper.

Unfortunately, the exception is if you're black, society "ain't" gonna accept "y'all", no matter how much time passes.

The "Language Police" should be more like Immigrations Officers, who try to keep it manageable, limiting illegals to a slow trickle, so that for the most part, we can keep the riff-raff away from polite society, with the exception of the odd few that find ways to be useful. One can appreciate the role of Immigrations Officers while wanting nothing to do with them in day to day life, for example, one might be offended to see an arrest made a cocktail party, preferring instead that it be done out of their view.