I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

@intransitivelie I've been meaning to reread The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson again.

@SeriousMoonlight @intransitivelie

I quite enjoyed "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by McWhorter as well. It has a lot of grammatical history, and a number of crackpot theories that seem similarly convincing to the accepted crackpot theories of how English's various bits moved around before we inherited them.