Not. Even. Kidding.
It’s time to declare war on grammar snobs. They are both annoying and wrong:I "believe" in fuck all, Erik. I follow grammar rules because they make sense and hold the English language together. Shame on you; from your own writing I know you know better.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I can’t get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. It’s just a convention that we don’t use double negatives of that form in Standard English. [So is saying please and thank you a convention. Must we rid ourselves of all polite conventions?]Some other pedantic stipulations are destructive pieces of folklore, like the belief that it is wrong to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition. We should be entirely relaxed about that sort of choice. Why worry, as some pedants do, about whether to write “firstly” or “first” when you begin a list of points? Either is correct. [No, they are not both correct.]The range of legitimate variation is wider than you would imagine. Yes, you may use “hopefully” as an adverb modifying an entire sentence [NO, you may NOT]; and you may use “they” as a singular generic pronoun [NO, you may NOT]; and you may say “between you and I.” [NO, you may NOT] The pedants’ prohibitions on constructions like these are not supported by the evidence of general usage. [General usage is proof of nothing but general usage; is the fact that every driver speeds proof that speeding should be legal?]Pedantry is poor manners, certainly, but also poor scholarship. If someone tells you that you “can’t” write something, ask them why not. [Grammarians never say "can't." We say "literate, educated people don't.] Rarely will they have an answer that makes grammatical sense; it is probably just a superstition that they have carried around with them for years.[Grammar is not superstition; the idea that popular illiteracy should govern speech is superstition.]This is followed with a history of grammar snobbery that should make any grammar snob think twice about the “rules” they believe in.
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