A Polite Reminder For the Grammar Nazis Amongst us · 3:43pm Oct 28th, 2015
The TLDR of this is English changes over time, and is a diversified language with may distinct dialects. You should check to see what English dialect a piece is written in before saying "I didn't eat no dinner." is wrong, because in several English dialects, that is infact the correct way to convay that information, and "I didn't eat any dinner." would be wrong. Isn't language fun?
Excerpt from:
Birner, Betty. "Is English Changing." Linguistic Society of America. http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/english-changing Web. 28 Oct. 2015.
Why can't people just use correct English?
By 'correct English', people usually mean Standard English. Most languages have a standard form; it's the form of the language used in government, education, and other formal contexts. But Standard English is just one dialect of English.
What's important to realize is that there's no such thing as a 'sloppy' or 'lazy' dialect. Every dialect of every language has rules - not 'schoolroom' rules like 'don't split your infinitives', but rather the sorts of rules that tell us that the cat slept is a sentence of English, but slept cat the isn't. These rules tell us what language is like rather than what it should be like.
Different dialects have different rules. For example:
(l) I didn't eat any dinner.
(2) I didn't eat no dinner.
Sentence (l) follows the rules of Standard English; sentence (2) follows a set of rules present in several other dialects. But neither is sloppier than the other; they just differ in the rule for making a negative sentence. In (l), dinner is marked as negative withany; in (2), it's marked as negative with no. The rules are different, but neither is more logical or elegant than the other. In fact, Old English regularly used 'double negatives', parallel to what we see in (2), and many modern languages, including Italian and Spanish, either allow or require more than one negative word in a sentence. Sentences like (2) only sound 'bad' if you didn't happen to grow up speaking a dialect that uses them.
You may have been taught to avoid 'split infinitives', as in (3):
(3) I was asked to thoroughly water the garden.
This is said to be 'ungrammatical' because thoroughly splits' the infinitive to water. Why are split infinitives so bad? Here's why: Seventeenth-century grammarians believed Latin was the ideal language, so they thought English should be as much like Latin as possible. In Latin, an infinitive like to water is a single word; it's impossible to split it up. So today, 300 years later, we're still being taught that sentences like (3) are wrong, all because someone in the 1600's thought English should be more like Latin.
Here's one last example. Over the past few decades, three new ways of reporting speech have appeared:
(4) So Karen goes, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!"
(5) So Karen is like, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!"
(6) So Karen is all, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!"
In (4), goes means pretty much the same thing as said; it's used for reporting Karen's actual words. In (5), is like means the speaker is telling us more or less what Karen said. If Karen had used different words for the same basic idea, (5) would be appropriate, but (4) would not. Finally, is all in (6) is a fairly new construction. In most of the areas where it's used, it means something similar to is like, but with extra emotion. If Karen had simply been reporting the time, it would be okay to say She's like, "It's five o'clock", but odd to say She's all, "It's five o'clock" - unless there was something exciting about it being five o'clock.
A lazy way of talking? Not at all; the younger generation has made a useful three-way distinction where we previously only had the word said. Language will never stop changing; it will continue to respond to the needs of the people who use it. So the next time you hear a new phrase that grates on your ears, remember that, like everything else in nature, the English language is a work in progress.
So what you're saying is you are the Grammar Nazi with the final solution?
3502581 Nein, ich sage, dass darüber zu streiten, grammatikalische Korrektheit dumm ist über die Maßen!
3502614 So why do you let me edit? (I keed I keed, I just fix punctuation and spelling errors mostly.)
3502867 Because you are great at Standard English, and i write in Standard English.
Correction.
How will modern English fare against this heathen newspeak?
3503206 NEWS-PEAK, WHERE!?
3504437 Political correctness is the word!
3505726 Lol it's not PC to recognize that your language has dialects! Not if you then proceed to riddle them for their incorrect grammer in the dielct being used.
3505813 No I'm talking about how Political correctness is becoming its own dialect.
3505823 Oh, well yes, it is. It's called Doltish English.
3505829 Well could be worse right? Could be cockney.