*were
Can I ask why you take the time to correct someone when it was perfectly clear what the intent of the sentence was?
There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).
Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.
Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.
A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.
Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?
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Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.
That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.
Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.
If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.
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Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.
What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.
As a foreigner I feel the same about English and its declining quality of grammar on the web
Please keep (politely) correcting people. It's only us against the hordes!
Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.
Since when, exactly? http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/18553?rskey=7qC25f&result=2#ei...
> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-
Really? I live and learn. I thought that was commonplace.
...literally describes our ENTIRE language. It's kinda what language is... I know "kinda" isn't officially a word yet but I like it and I'm guessing you know my intended meaning.
Or should I say 'irreinterpret it'? After all, you would 'know what I meant' if I wrote that.
Ambiguity is fine if you're writing for poetic effect, but if you're trying to get a point across, it should be minimised.
[1] why not irregard instead of regardless?
Also, most English dialects don't strictly follow double-negation rules. I know this drives non-native speakers crazy, but you'll get over it with enough practice.
And it does fit the pattern of negating the root morpheme.
> irregardless
regardless is fine.