I am about to rant. I know that this is an uncool and totally useless thing to to, but I just (gasp) can't (struggle) help myself. I am going to complain about bad grammar. You can leave now. No? Okay, imagine me writing this between thumps as my head hits my desk.
This afternoon I read an article in one of our local papers in which a woman who describes herself as a graduate in journalism wrote ' [A daughter] has kept my husband, Joe, and I running.' I have just finished sending her as polite an email as I could contrive, pointing out her blooper and explaining how to correct it. I did not explain it by parsing the sentence, for two reasons. One is that I have no idea how grammar is being taught in this century but am pretty sure it is not taught the way I learned (and taught, in my turn). The other is that, shaming though it is, I have to admit that I was not sure how to explain why what she had written was wrong in a clear and concise way.
The Board that I chair had a horrible task at its last meeting; we had to review and approve a huge list of updated and revised policies. Several of us went through the text ahead of time and made corrections to the grammar and punctuation. At the meeting, when we reached this stage of the agenda, I started the item by pointing out that this had been done and urging anyone who had found further errors of this type to mark it on printed copy of the policy in question and hand it to the recording secretary after the meeting. I then went on to explain that I was asking the board members to ignore one recurring error, that of subject and possessive pronoun/adjective agreement. In other words, when they got to something that said "An employee is requested to keep their valuables in a locked drawer during working hours", they were to approve it without whinging about the agreement. This misalignment is done in the name of political correctness; that is, the easiest way to use a possessive without getting into the whole male/female thing is to use the plural. At this, the recording secretary looked at me and said 'I have no clue what you are talking about!'
The case agreement is one of those grammar points that is slipping out of at least American English (and I class Canadian English as American English - we all live in North America after all.) I have heard a Master's student say 'Me and my dad went canoeing.' I have read, in a letter from a PhD, 'Thanks for the help you gave David and I'. It makes my teeth grind. There are other - I guess I have to call them niceties - that are being swept away on the tide. The distinction between 'lie' and 'lay', the difference between 'less' and 'fewer'. The subjunctive. As well, I think the use of tired metaphors is increasing. By leaps and bounds.
You can easily understand what someone is trying to convey in a sentence that contains those errors. But speaking this way, in my opinion, is like going out in public in old, ripped jeans, uncombed hair, uncleaned teeth and food spots on the tee shirt It's sloppy. We all make errors and have bad hair days, but most of us, I think, try to present ourselves to others positively. We proofread and change our tee shirts and check our teeth in the bathroom mirror.
The poor young woman who received my grammatical correction earlier has emailed me back a very nice and polite email, thanking me for the information and saying that if anyone ever pointed this out to her before, she does not remember it.
I used to teach the difference between 'lie' and 'lay' by saying that since 'lay' takes an object, you have to 'lay' something or some one. Usually there was a moment of fraught silence as the adolescents in front of me tried to believe that they had really heard what they thought they had heard. And they remembered it.