I agree...I find myself on both sides and that's why I presented both sides. I've decided that I want to learn as much from the prescriptivists as possible, sin

I agree...I find myself on both sides and that's why I presented both sides. I've decided that I want to learn as much from the prescriptivists as possible, since I find the evolution of language to be a fascinating topic. But I've also decided that I have very little interest in correcting people, so I try to vary my behavior contextually. I do my best to avoid mistakes in grammar in my own speech, but I don't correct other people that use them. And I try to use as much language precision as I feel the listeners are able to grasp. It's almost like a client-capability protocol upgrade in the tech world...if you can use the enhanced protocol, you can benefit from it. But if your client (the person you're speaking to) doesn't understand the subtlety of your word choice, it's pointless and potentially confusing to choose the more advanced usages. So I fall back to the common usages that tend to bother prescriptivists. But since this forum seems to be the more capable, here's one departure that people might find interesting. "All intensive purposes" is a malaprop, a specific language error that's almost never considered to be correct. But they can be fascinating examples of how we make sense of the world. My mother was a child psychologist for 30 years and collected malaprops from the children she saw. Children, especially those who have not yet started to read, have very small vocabularies and learn words phonetically from those that speak to them. When they encounter words that they don't know, they try to make sense of them from the context in which they're used and the similar words that they've already learned. This is a surprisingly effective technique, but often results in some interesting mistakes that surface as malaprops. My favorite example was a child that thought that Alzheimer's disease was actually "old timer's" disease. From that one mistake, you can really see how children approach unfamiliarity in their world.