Asklemmy

My philosophy is that languages are made up to make communication easier and they change all the time anyway. So as long as you are understood, that's more important than getting the grammar to be perfect. Getting it like 80% right is plenty and that last 20% consists of a bunch of obscure or ambiguous rules that would take up way too much of my processing power to keep track of while communicating, thus hindering the purpose of using language in the first place. Also, English is a stupid mess of a language. I don't have enough respect for it to follow all of it's rules.

That said... what DOES bug me a little is people who make videos who regularly misuse words. Not because I think it's that big of a deal, but... come on... this is your job and you have complete control over the work at every step of the way and have so many opportunities to correct mistakes. You write the script. You read it. You watch it again while doing editing and could easily re-record bits that are wrong or awkward. Although perhaps this is less about the language specifically and more about leaving mistakes and bloopers in videos in general. That's what editing is for. We have more advanced editing tools available to the average person than ever before. USE THEM!

Y'all is completely fine to use. It was a mistake for English to lose its distinction between second person singular and plural. Either we accept the word "y'all" or we go back to saying thou and thee, either way we can't just keep on awkwardly dancing around not having a distinction between second person plural and singular.

"Y'all"

I will die on the hill that it's more efficient and neutral than the alternatives.

I will always use “who” because “whom” gives off too much of a Reddit vibe.

Period AFTER the end of a quote.

My buddy Joe told me “I will live and die on this hill”.

Using commas, wherever you want.

They should be logical thought breaks, not adhere to any rules of grammar.

Putting the punctuation outside the quotes (or parentheses) when the quote is only part of a sentence. I.e. He said "I need to go now".

My pet peeve is people thinking they are being clever by complaining about the supposed incorrect usage of literally as figuratively.

People, including famous authors, have been literally (not hyperbole) using the word as an intensifier, and therefore, figuratively, since 1847, e.g. F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray.

Did we change the definition of 'literally'? | Merriam-Webster - https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

Deliberately not capitalising proper nouns as a show of disrespect (countries, people, titles, etc). Not "grammatically correct" but I think it falls under freedom of expression.

A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their 'mistakes' have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.

informal contractions are simply informal just because. there’s no real reason to consider them informal or not standard other than arbitrary rules.

“You shouldn’t’ve done that.” “It couldn’t’ve been him!” “I might’ve done that if you asked.”

I'm of the opinion that so long as it is understandable it does not matter. English was once written as it sounded and there was no spelling consistancy. Those who were literate had little issue with it.

Some related reading: https://ctcamp.franklinresearch.uga.edu/resources/reading-middle-english https://cb45.hsites.harvard.edu/middle-english-basic-pronunciation-and-grammar

Edit: Okay my rant is more related to spelling than grammar but still interesting.

Passive voice is completely fine to use.

Anything that is used colloquially but technically isn't correct because some loser didn't like it 200 years ago. To boldly keep on splitting infinitives is a rejection of language prescriptivism!

It's not a grammar mistake per se, but I feel like sharing it and it is close enough so here we go.

As a non-native English speaker: How can you have mop~~b~~ and vacuum the floor but not broom the room?! I know it doesn't exist, but I don't care. If we have to phrase it as a grammar mistake: I use verbalisations where they are uncommon.

I am not in defence of but actually annoyed by:

Using if instead of whether. For example: "I will check if the window is open". This means: "if the window is open, I will check". What people mean to say is "I will check whether the window is open".

Also, using was in hypotheticals instead of the correct were. For example: if I were going to check whether the window was open, I wouldn't be standing here. Not "if I was going to check [...]".

I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don't think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, "he's coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning," as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, "he's coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning."

I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it's a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated

abbreviations. it doesn't save any meaningful time. it only prompts questions for clarification because people don't define the abbreviation prior to using it throughout their post. plus since everything is being abbreviated out of laziness, the same abbreviations get used for multiple things which just adds additional confusions.

Singular they. I've had this opinion since long before I even knew about non-binary people. Using "he or she" to refer to a person without specifying gender is clunky as hell.

In German there's the saying "macht Sinn", which is wrong since it's just a direct translation of "makes sense". Correct would be "ergibt Sinn", in English "results in sense", but I don't care, "macht Sinn" rolls off the tongue easier.

Ending a sentence with a proposition is just fine. Picky people whom I've only seen parodies of on the Internet go "oh you ended your sentence with a preposition I have no idea what you mean by 'He went in' maybe you could explain what he went into? A jello mold? A ditch? What did go into?"

You asked if he went into the store and I said he went in, you know what I meant because of CONTEXT CLUES.

I've never met anyone who's ever been this picky but I'm ready to bite them if I ever find one.

Sometimes a sentence ending with a proposition just sounds better.