this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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I suppose you're the type of person who believes that once an error gets enough momentum it is no longer a error. I doubt that I'll be able to change your mind, but I'll give it shot anyway.
While I recognise that we no longer speak the English of Shakespeare, it's a very different thing to suggest that when people make grammatical errors today, it's just a part of the natural development of a language.
I would put it to you that English of today is actually changing more slowly than it has it past, because of better global education, better access to the same consistent sets of grammatical rules (it's very easy to look things up on the internet today - that was not the case in London in 1600), and we have far more exposure to geographically distanced social interactions between people from all over the world through social media on a daily basis, than has ever existed before.
There are certainly variants and dialects where specific language structures differ from others, but it is simply wrong to claim that "me and my friend went shopping" is grammatically correct simply because it's a common error. It's not, it's an error, in just the same way that mispelling their/they're/there is wrong, and the way that using an apostrophe in possessive pronouns is wrong.
I lament the loss of adverbs in favour of adjectives, where someone might say "I will do that quick" (should be 'quickly'), or the even more common one, "I did good" (should be 'well' - people do well, Mother Teresa did good). If we simply allow these errors because they're deemed close enough to understand someone, then should we just throw out the rules, sit back, and watch the resulting confusion with glee? The reason we teach people grammar is precisely so that they can be precise, not just so that they can be understood. Being able to "just be understood" is no more than the most basic level of communication, and should not be the bar that one aims for in life.
I'm not prescribing that everyone needs to stick to one specific set of grammar rules, nor am I suggesting that they need to stick to all the rules of the dialect they speak, but I do suggest that there are commonly made errors which are obviously wrong, and which can be trivially corrected to improve communication. I've been hauled up on adding a space before a question mark, which I think is more of style thing than a grammar rule, and I'm not so worried about that sort of thing (some people are, I'm not). I'm not even that worried about the occasional or obvious typo, but I do get irritated by basic words being regularly mispelled or substituted for other similar sounding words, and I do get irritated when I see people not being able to get the sentence structure of subject/verb/object correct, as we saw here.
Whether you agree it or not, having a poor command of grammar does affect a person's credibility, particularly in professional and legal roles, and it's such so simple to put a bit of effort in to correct it, before it becomes a bad habit.
That is literally how language works. If you have any idea about historical linguistics, you would know this.
Do you have some proposal to make about how "natural development" occurs as opposed to errors that gain momentum that somehow we overlooked as linguists? Do you seriously think people were any less incensed by changes in pronunciations and grammar 1000 years ago than they are today? As someone who actually studied historical linguistics, I can tell you that there is no distinction between natural development and errors that gain momentum. Is there some kind of guiding force that makes it okay for palatalisation to occur in Old English but not for t-glottalisation to occur in Modern English? Or is it okay for the grammatical case system to "naturally" disappear everywhere except pronouns, in which case it's a horrible modern error?
I think you're right that language changes differently in some ways these days, in particular due to widespread literacy and enforcement of certain grammatical standards in schools. But the reason these standards have to be enforced is because they are often in opposition to what are actually already well-established grammatical rules in spoken language. To be clear, I'm in no way arguing that we shouldn't teach formal grammar for writing and higher register use, but you need to understand that this doesn't invalidate the very real grammar of other registers.