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by mmmpop
3272 days ago
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It's been pointed out to me lately that "prescriptive grammar" is apparently classist/racist, which is strange considering I grew up dirt poor in Appalachia but still bothered to learn the difference in "who" and "whom". In languages like French it's a crucial understanding but English got lazy and for whatever reason, direct object pronouns are a tripping point for many students of a foreign language. Astounding. |
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It surely is. Caring about language (caring about anything, really) is an honest signal of status, whether you like it or not. Inevitably, some people will try to slave-moralize it away. If some social/ethnic/sex/... minority with inferiority complexes jumps on this bandwagon, suddenly you may find yourself caring about a thing whose ignorance some social scientists somewhere have found to be correlated with holy cows.
Proposed solution: stop caring about everything besides making all people feel good about themselves.