Also, should be Oxford English Dictionary's. Gotta watch that punctuation. :)

Theirs always someone nitpicking...

I love your (presumably) deliberate grammar error given the context of this tangent.

> Theirs always someone nitpicking...

https://i.imgur.com/L2Rhc.png

Based on my limited experience, people who think grammar Nazis are annoying shouldn't be suspected of being too intelligent.

Language is about communicating ideas, I couldn't care less if someone leaves out that arcane little tick or uses the wrong pronoun. In 99% of cases it makes no difference to comprehensibility.

Not to someone who can't tell the difference, no. But that's true of anything.

They derail the conversation. Of course they're annoying..

I will never mind a "Hey, you misspelled «X»". I can agree "Ha, he misspelled «Y», he's such a complete moron" is annoying/disruptive, but I don't think the answer to assholes is to stop caring about basic grammar rules. Incidentally, as an outsider I've never seen people being as careless/clueless with their language as British/American people are. A result of the education system or society, maybe.

I think it's mostly the number of common homophones and the speed at which most English speakers think and type that causes the problem. Add that to obscure language rules and you can end up with something that looks completely wrong, but isn't.

A great example is "red-head scarf"; what you read is "(read head) scarf" what it means is "red (head scarf)". Granted, it makes the wording unnecessarily complicated, but it's probably grammatically correct.

By calling yourself an outsider, I'm assuming that you don't speak British or American English? If so, you're not really in a good position to judge grammaticality.

Or possibly a result of the number of people using the language. Including those with only limited experience.

I was talking about native British and American speakers. Not to mention that most of the people I've been in contact with were (highly) educated.

> it’s usage

That’s not the only nor the biggest nit you can pick with this essay.

Let me copy/paste a reply I just posted.

"Let me shame you every time you introduce a bug/typo in your code."

The compiler I use does that already, thanks