Political correctness sets its sights on the grammar nazi's

So it really all depends on where you are, who you're talking to, etc.

If you're the President of the United States and it's the State of the Union, probably a fairly formal, conservative style is called for. But that's social convention, it has nothing to do with clarity.

Let's look at so-called 'ebonics', AAVE. It's actually a distinct dialect of English, with its own systematic grammatical structures, some of which actually provide a more clear, succinct way to express certain things than the standard language does. Examples include habitual "be", where "He be eating sushi" actually means something quite different from "he eat sushi." The former is "he habitually eats sushi", maybe he has it for lunch every day. The latter is "he eats sushi" as a general statement. We don't have a grammatical structure for that in standard English, you have to translate it with a long winded explanation.

Another issue is that natural language is inherently ambiguous and redundant, and this is a feature, not a bug. Think about talking on the phone. If you talk on a land line phone, and you pay attention to the audio, you'll notice that you don't ever actually hear the "s" sound, it's too high frequency, it gets cut out, but you get on just fine because you can distinguish "stop" from "top" based on the effect the "s" has on the following "t", which is totally redundant. Or think about questions. We already add a question word, so why do we have to change the word order too? In Mandarin you don't, instead of "who is that?" you say "that is who?".

Now you can establish a kind of code by restricting the meanings of words to technical meanings and introducing all kinds of jargon, and that's how it's possible to unambiguously discuss mathematics or engineering disciplines or the like, but that's an artificial device, much like writing itself, it's a useful technological overlay over natural language.

/r/Conservative Thread Parent Link - nationalreview.com