I wonder if we are ever going to get our civil liberties back. I was taught in grade school about the Bill of Rights. I was taught to be proud of our freedoms, and then came the war on drugs to show up how easily these right can be taken away. We now have the War on Terror that seems to have made even speaking of those rights unAmerican. Neither of these Wars on Nouns have a way to end and neither are doing any good.
If you are going to talk about rights violation and children, don't forget DCFS and its sister organizations in other states. DCFS has no checks on its powers. No one has any way to even review what they do. In many cases regular courts have come head to head with DCFS and lost. Ask Kelly about what they can do that normal agencies are not permitted to.
Augghh. Ending sentences with prepositions was already common usage for centuries before a bunch of stuck-up busybodies with too much time on their hands decided that we shouldn't do it. I refuse to bow to the tyranny of 19th-century grammarians.
I quite agree with Don in this. I am moving away from the grammar prescriptivist stance, mainly because following prescriptivists too much resembles relying on Microsoft Word for grammar instruction. I have heard people advising to avoid using "which" for any reason, partly because it confuses Word. I don't want our rules of grammar limited and defined by what we can program a computer to parse. Mind you, I am not opposed to using computers in linguistics; I just don't want them to be the masters.