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 do agree with your sentiment (esp. the bits about racism and classism), but I've seen my share of problems caused by people who're all happily speaking broken English while not sharing a native language and thus completely misunderstanding each other.

It's fine for poetry. It's not fine for e.g. safety instructions.

@dare
That's a stylistic issue. If you write for a publication, you follow their manual of style. Standards exist for various linguistic things, and I'm in favor of them in the same way I'm in favor of other standards so my wrench will fit bolts from different manufacturers, for example. But that's not English, that's standards. The language itself is far more forgiving than any standard.