(Here's the beginning of all this)
Tim Saward's response to my post:
Jen - you're in danger of becoming the Lynn Truss of musical theatre, and god knows it doesn't need any more of those :)
PS. The bit I disagreed with was "But it does contribute to the gradual infiltration of bad craft and sloppy writing" cos it implies that a preponderance of inexactly-crafted material affects people's ability to enjoy and recognise well-crafted material, which it doesn't.
Also, it does tend to presuppose that the craft rules you consider important are *the* craft rules that are worth following by everyone. Scansion and prosody have an objective basis (nearly), but so do humour, or elusiveness, or aesthetic beauty, or recognisability, or intellectual import, or clarity or abstraction. Any of these can trump the other. All lyrics represent a trade-off between these things and other priorities, not least the ever-present tension between musical phrasing and lyrical phrasing (which musical theatre of the school of Sondheim tends to solve by suborning integrity of musical phrasing).
Lynn Truss goes wrong, IMO, when applying the same premises to language, i.e. that the rules of language she learned at school have objective authority over other rules and that other people's practising of other rulesets is bad because it erodes people's ability to use language "correctly".
In actual fact, what she's complaining about is that her version of the language isn't as privileged as she'd like in the general culture. The rules that musical theatre considers important aren't as important in the culture at large, and, for me at least, that's perfectly OK.
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