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Hmmm...so you give people a pass on poor writing skills but not poor speaking skills? I think the too are very closely related.
To an extent you are correct; however, I don't expect everyone to understand what a gerund is, or to have a preference between a serial and non-serial comma, etc.
In terms of basic grammar I would agree that there is a correlation. The classic there/they're/their error comes to mind.
"Ain't" dates at least from the 18th century, and its antecessor "An't" from the 17th century, and they were used by people like Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens, who can hardly be classed as ignorant.
They were used by those writers to typify certain characters. That's completely different.
I'm sorry, but most of that mess is NOT proper grammar. It's not southern, it's country - plain and simple. I contend that grammar does not change due to accents or regions...the rules stay the same. As a teacher I'm going to have to disagree with your entire post, and it's rather offensive that you think that we think it's correct in the South. We aren't as ignorant as you apparently think.
Does 2+2 still equal 4 in the South, or can it be "different"? Do the rules change between dialects?
Thank you for making this point. A double negative makes something a positive. Certain grammatical rules are based on logic.
Take, for example, the argument for the word "irregardless." It's listed in the dictionary so it must be correct, right?
However, the prefix "ir" means "not," while the suffix "less" means "without." Therefore, the word irregardless means "not without regard," or "with regard," which isn't what people usually mean when they say irregardless.
I'm not sure why it's perfectly okay for people to state that a particular accent annoys them but I can't find poor grammar annoying? As someone who makes her living as a writer, I am affected by the rise and fall of the English language. I'm not going to argue my opinion any further.
I often use double negatives as a positive, though i'm not sure why as just saying the positive does seem simpler.
It's perfectly okay to be annoyed by bad grammar, i'm just saying from a purely scientific standpoint bad grammar is just a point of view. Let's take something I hear a lot in Pennsylvania:
"Needs fixed". Hey, where'd that "to be" go? It sounds pretty weird but in the parts of Pennsylvania where people say it it's perfectly normal and is correct grammar for that dialect. Now if they go and write "needs fixed" in their academic paper that's horribly wrong - and it is also perfectly acceptable to be annoyed by such usage: "needs fixed" bugs me when I hear it. But from a linguistic standpoint there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I'm sorry, but most of that mess is NOT proper grammar. It's not southern, it's country - plain and simple. I contend that grammar does not change due to accents or regions...the rules stay the same. As a teacher I'm going to have to disagree with your entire post, and it's rather offensive that you think that we think it's correct in the South. We aren't as ignorant as you apparently think.
Does 2+2 still equal 4 in the South, or can it be "different"? Do the rules change between dialects?
Actually double negatives used to be the norm in English, just like they're the norm in other languages today, like Spanish and Greek. Lots of famous writers in the English language used double negatives. Some dialects held still hold on to that. It doesn't make them wrong. Wrong is subjective in language. What people think of as "correct" actually just means Standard English. But that was kinda arbitrarily chosen anyway.
There is nothing more annoying than girls who have to drop the word "like" five times in a sentence and end every sentence with "you know". It just sounds so anti-intellectual
Thick New York accents annoy me. They sound so stooooopid.
Ok I know that everyone thinks I'm a terrible NYer but I have to ask this question (and it's an honest, innocent question not meant to offend anyone so please just see it for what it is):
Wouldn't you rather have a thick NY accent that is understandable versus a southern accent that mixes and slurs all the words together that makes it impossible to understand?
My parents both have mild New England accents and my aunts and uncles all have very heavy NY accents, so I've become accustomed to both. Now that I live in Atlanta, I often take a step back and try to figure out why southern people with thick accents tell me that they can't understand me sometimes because of mine. The NY/New England accent might be annoying, but I just feel that it's hard to say southern accents are less annoying and more natural sounding than NY accents.
Know what I'm sayin'?
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It's like ... you know
They sound so stooooopid.