My apologies, sir. I think I may have been a little “nit picky”. 
I never meant to imply that “heighth” wasn’t a valid word, and I assure you, in everyday conversation, I mangle the hell out of the english language. (My high school english teachers are probably “rolling in their graves”, everytime I open my mouth! :D)
On this, I concur with you, 100%! 
[QUOTE=JBDivmstr;13995501You seem to contradict yourself, sir. In the beginning of your post you imply with your “glacier analogy”, that teachers have ***no control ***over how we speak.
And yet, you go on to state that teachers do indeed, “tell you what other people currently think to be correct”.[/QUOTE]
There is no contradiction.
You choose to think I implied something I didn’t. A boulder has an effect on a glacier, however small. Teachers have little control, not none. They tell you what other people currently think to be correct, but that doesn’t mean they have much effective control.
People learn their language from listening and most of their listening is to parents, friends, television etc. They also learn it from what they read. Teacher contact hours and school imposed reading are but a drop in the bucket of total immersion by which people learn language.
My apologies, sir. I forgot my manners and broke the “assume” rule. 
One shouldn’t assume. By “assuming”, I made an “ass u me”!
The point is that nobody except actors, news anchors, and politicians ever speak Standard written English. And they only do when someone has written a script for them, in that form of English. The rest of us speak American English or British English, or other regional dialects that are spoken languages. You learn spoken English from your parents and peers. You learn written English from books and grammar teachers. But the rules and expectations are different between them.
Coldth? I’ve never heard that one before.
I think he meant “coolth” which is becoming accepted.
I highly disagree with this narrow-minded assessment of language. Someone who has been highly-even moderately-educated throughout their life will develop language skills as a symbiotic combination of written language AND spoken language. They do not exist seperately, a lifelong book-reader is going to have a much more expansive vocabulary in their spoken language; as a result of high levels of written language learning. And all those “grammar teachers” will teach a person how to form this spoken language in their heads before it’s spoken. Consider it the “mental written English” . To truly be able to use the language to the best of IT"S capabilities, even as it evolves as a spoken language, one must learn and know the written history of the language.
(and no, people shouldn’t use that word. It’s akin to say “supposably”. Yeah, people say it, but so what?)
You’ve “beaten me to the punch”, sir!
And IMHO, quite eloquently, at that!
(And way more succintly, than I could, or would, have been!) 
The point is well taken, but that was a low blow.
Its capabilities, not it’s. And I don’t know that anyone would disagree with you. Of course, you don’t need to be educated really at all to develop a language. Creoles are created by children who don’t know the difference between an aspect and a tense yet they manage to create them just fine. You have to remember that a language need not also have a writing system to be considered a language. There are plenty of minority languages that have no standardized way of writing them down and they still function as a language. It’s always a good thing to learn about things, not just your language, but remember that just because coolth isn’t a word today and wasn’t a word 200 years ago, doesn’t mean it can’t be a word next week. (And every word you use now was a nouveau addition to the language at some time.)
jamiemcgarry writes:
> To truly be able to use the language to the best of IT"S capabilities, even as it
> evolves as a spoken language, one must learn and know the written history of
> the language.
I don’t know of any evidence that this is remotely true. In societies where most people were nonliterate (and sometimes where there was no written language at all), there were brilliant orators who never learned to read. They listened to other orators and learned their techniques. They didn’t learn anything about the history of the language, and they didn’t even read anything at all. There are lots of brilliant writers today who know almost nothing about the history of their languages, and they often have read very little older writings in their language. They simply read a lot of current writing in their language and imitated good models. Knowing the history of the language may be a good thing in itself, but it’s not in general the way to learn how to write well.
I think there is a difference. An airplane can fly at a height of ten thousand feet but it doesn’t have a heighth of ten thousand feet. But a building has a heighth - it spans the distance between the ground and its highest point. To me, heighth describes an object’s size - the equivalent of width and length. Whereas height describes an object’s location.
The object’s location is called altitude or elevation, not height.
I wonder what that teacher would have to say about “irregardless” there…:rolleyes:
It can be but height’s a much more common term.
I got into an arguement with a high school senior english teacher that I was dating. I told her there was no such word! She also didnt know what an IUD was, and that was scary because she was also a counselor for senior girls.
Now that just sounds down right freaky…
The pronunciation of heighth isn’t really in question here, but all those other words, which lend some modicum of plausibility to the word heighth because they end in th: depth, width, length, have an audible consonant sound before the ‘th’. Therefore I would think this word-that-is-in-dispute should be spelled with two 't’s: heightth. Otherwise wouldn’t the word be pronounced hi-th?
I like the Urban Dictionary’s entry:
It was the rejected name for Hoth.