What I'm railing against is more that there appears to be little interest, in general, even to try to get things right. I see this not just in human language, but in business, software development, publishing, pretty much everywhere.
I'm really tired, so I'm not expressing myself as well as I should, so perhaps I should just wrap this up and get some sleep. An iPad is also not the best UI for writing on HN.
Thanks for your thoughtful and thought-provoking response.
Language is a means to an end. If my entire audience understands what I am saying, and is not put-off by how I say it, then I did, in fact, get things right.
You need to draw a line somewhere, or you will end up spending your life obsessing over unimportant details of what you write instead of actually communicating.
It may also happen that the one person who you felt was not "worth the trouble" turns out to be someone who will be very important to you one day, like a potential business partner or investor, and who interprets your misuse of language as ignorance.
There's a difference between obsessing over unimportant detail and being thorough, IMHO.
OMG u shuld see wat they do in germanny its so different their!
But at some point you do start to get diminishing returns, so there are practical limits to how worried one should be about pedants.
Note that the prominent English dictionaries have usage panels that make judgements about whether the usage of a certain form of a word is sufficiently wide as their criteria for inclusion.
It's not that it is not ok to identify something as wrong, but you will need to accept that people will disagree with it, and that what is wrong to you now may very well have enough support in usage that the battle is already lost. When you then opt for comparisons to Trump, then it is not surprising that you get downvotes.
A lot of the "I'll say it however I please" is down to usage. I'll drag out my favourite example: "begs the question". It's my favourite because I didn't even know about the original meaning until I started seeing rants about how horrible the new meaning was. Do a search for it today, and the results are dominated by sites complaining about how awful the change is, and articles about it.
To date, I can recall only one instance where I've seen the original meaning used outside of such a rant. It's basically a lost battle, where people will often respond along the lines of "I'll say it however I please" for the simple reason that to most people the original meaning is entirely foreign because of its niche usage.
Usage panels, which often lags trends like this, for good reason, have in recent years started tipping towards the new usage for "begs the question", often marking the original form as "formal", because ultimately language is about communication, and you can not communicate effectively if you pretend the most common form doesn't exist. Here [1] is an article at Merriam Webster discussing the issue.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...