3 ms·

I feel like there's a difference between the extremes of misguided prescriptivism and pedantry about basic grammar rules. But I'm not sure I can say much to ju

I feel like there's a difference between the extremes of misguided prescriptivism and pedantry about basic grammar rules. But I'm not sure I can say much to justify that without essentially suggesting that everyone should learn the language of intellectuals for their benefit (i.e. so we don't stumble over incorrect there/their/they're).

bane 11y ago
It's a spectrum of course. There's some things that are clearly not correct for a given mode of a language. What's interesting of course about issues like there/their/they're is in all likelihood, at some point in the future, the orthography will simply converge and we'll just use context to tell the difference. After all, there's plenty of words with the same orthography and different meanings. Languages tend towards simplicity and the kind of tension unnecessary orthographic differences make is exactly the kind that languages evolve away from.