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A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English. That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities. Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences. If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished. --- Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter. |
What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.
Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw