What's the dumbest fucking thing you have heard someone say?

Are you saying that I should be accepting of peoples' stupidity, and to lower my expectations of what, to most educated folk, would be considered common knowledge?

To me this just seems exceedingly hostile. There's no need for it. How arrogant are you to call it stupidity. Not everyone has to speak Standard English, language isn't confined to a ubiquitous and unchanging set of rules. It changes. For better or worse, if you accept Modern English, which I could just as easily call a bastardisation of Anglo-Saxon, a distorted version of the pure and perfect Anglo-Saxon by settlers and Anglophones alike, then it you can also accept language as it is changing now. People complained about it then, just a you're spouting your unsubstantiated argument now, except back then it was the French vocabulary, or increasing lack of declensions - people always find something to meticulously pick apart and complain that it isn't correct in some way. It's pedantry, plain and simple - not the good kind either - the biased, baseless nonsense that people come up with.

Sure, you can understand what people mean when they use incorrect grammar, but this does not mean that we should reinforce the idea that grammatical ignorance is alright.

You certainly can understand all the subtle nuance and no meaningful information, or even more subtle pragmatic information is lost when you parse this so-called ungrammatical usage. Not because it's just barely enough for you to piece together a sentence - it is nigh impossible for someone to screw the thing that has been deeply ingrained in their mind and culture for all their life. Languages couldn't exist without grammar - internal grammar. Not this don't split infinitives shit, or this don't end sentences with prepositions nonsense. Intrinisic grammar, like SVO order in English, like how he eats is understandable, him eats is not. Cultures and microcosms of dialect, your own damn idiolect don't just come up with new and ungrammatical stuff just to annoy the grammar elitists, they generally conform to internal grammar, otherwise they couldn't be understood, it doesn't need superfluous and unnecessary stuff to make sense and be easily parsed by an Anglophone. Such is the case with genitive 's - we put an apostrophe their with the <s> in writing to distinguish plurality and possession, what about spoken language? There's no equivalent of the apostrophe in spoken language, do we all babble incoherent nonsense? No. We deduce from word adjacency, context and intonation that when someone says "John's apple is red" they mean "the apple belonging to John is red".

You really have to understand the dichotomy of spoken and written English. Especially in English - the English orthography is abhorrently bad at transcribing what we say phonetically. We have a wealth of rules and exceptions to prevent ambiguity and aid in reading things. But you can't necessarily use the same logic with speech, which is the actual language, not a representation.

I always see people who posit totally misinformed stuff about how certain things are ungrammatical. It's always "they've lost their meaning" or "you can't put an object pronoun as the subject of a sentence" with no regard for what's actually happening on a fundamental level. Which brings me to this:

Here is a snippet of dialogue that demonstrates correct/incorrect usage of "I":

"Would you like to hang out with Jared and I?"

In this case, you would first test it out with only yourself, so:

"Would you like to hang out with I?" You wouldn't ever say this, it sounds idiotic.

"Would you like to hang out with me?" is correct, therefore, it's correct to say "Would you like to hang out with Jared and me."

You obviously, as an English speaker, understand that me takes the role of object, accusative case, whatever you'd like to call it. And I the role of subject, or nominative case. Therefore you can't put me in the subject position, or visa versa? Or perhaps that you could, but the sentence would mean something different?

Except this isn't the case when you actually analyse the sentence as it's understood by native speakers. And because of English not being at all agglutinative or declension-heavy for a couple centuries, nowadays using word order and arrangement to convey the same semantic elements, we can do things that wouldn't have made sense a couple of centuries ago. Think about the dative whom, we don't need the -m affix to understand that it has a dative role anymore so it is being phased out - and who is a perfectly widespread and normal alternative.

You would never hear "would you like to hang out with Jared and I?" and think that the subject of the sentence was I. You just see Jared and I after a verb and then deduce that it must be an object. Would you like to hang with I? isn't acceptable, but not because it wouldn't be understood, because we already use me for this case. By convention, Jared and I or whatever x and I is used by so many people that it has become part of the language. There isn't any other authority on language than the speakers themselves, and if the speakers say something a certain way, then it is inherently correct, such is the very nature of language - as a tool for expression, and communication.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent