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 Latin isn't Latin (like that) either. People wrote crap Latin on the walls of Pompei, soldiers and farmers spoke however they wanted no matter what Cicero wrote, and the power of the spoken word on the street is how we have all Latin's descendants today. English is not special in being a tongue for many people who use it differently according to their needs. By accident,.it has no academy and no standard, but even those languages that do have a naughty private life where things are very different.

I don't want to diss your point about letting go of arbitrary standards - I agree - but most languages borrow and have a range of registers and judgey prescripticists and so on. English isn't special that way.