English. Do you speak it?

For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.

The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over prescriptivism. It cites example of usage from Twitter FFS, then shows how even F. Scott Fitzgerald used “were” and “was” interchangeably.

English Motherfucker. Do you speak it?OK, fine. But, do we really not draw a distinction between “technically correct, but understandable only for those who actually know the language and potentially confusing for those who don’t?” and “technically wrong, but understandable to more people who don’t know the language, and places the burden of interpretation on the listener or reader, who has to adduce from context that which is not present in the text?”

Nope! An official source like Merriam Webster happily prescribes “YOU DO YOU BUDDY” as its official advice for how to write the subjunctive mood. Incredible. I am appalled. Is that not a complete dereliction of duty for a dictionary? Descriptivist trash. We are flying in the direction of a lowest-common-denominator language whose level of expressiveness will be determined by those who demand the least of it. Hooray.

Yeah, no. I’m going to die on this hill of grammatical rigor, spouting my sermon in a language become completely incomprehensible to everyone else. As with so much else, Idiocracy saw this coming.

Idiocracy: Your Shit's All Retarded (long version) (YouTube)

Amazing. The video is age-restricted because it uses the word “fag”. The same country that can’t stop killing thousands of people per day with its war machine—to say nothing of what it aids and abets with arms sales—gets its panties in a bunch about the word “fag”, whose intent has literally nothing to do with homosexuality in the context in which it was used. Priorities.