Most of the time, I actively work against my impulse to correct every language mistake I see in public because
- I don’t work for free
- Most English grammar rules are contextual at best
- And rooted in oppressive power structures at worst
- It’s just really annoying and usually not welcome enough to be helpful
I am happy, however, to pick a fight when I see someone else making a correction–in full confidence that they’re right and the rules they were taught are the only possible ones, and that they’re doing this speaker/writer a favor by showing them the way.
The thing is, English isn’t so much a language as a Macgyver-d together amalgamation of pocket contents and dinged up family heirlooms. Unlike most European-rooted language, we never really had a government authority created to set the rules and enforce them. And, since England was ruled in rapid succession by an often-contradictory variety of linguistic entities, the core structure and “rules” we’ve collected aren’t the product of a cohesive organizational effort. And they change. All the time.
The thing about English is that most of our rules are descriptive rather than prescriptive: they’re an observation of how we use the language, rather than guidelines for how to use it in the future. Since language is the core of communication, the only real rule we have is that your meaning needs to be clear, for the other participants in that linguistic exchange.
That means, practically speaking, that the real goal is to understand the circumstances of your communication in order to determine what’s proper in that context. Defaulting to umbrella rules will usually just get you in trouble.
But. That doesn’t mean we don’t have any guidelines or help. English isn’t entirely a barroom brawl of a language. Keep an eye out here for a series of deep dives on grammar and linguistic “rules” that cause problems, clean up messes, and are generally just a bit more fluid than you may have been led to believe.
Something Polished 