Actually, too many people need to listen to her. But fortunately, she couldn’t be bothered.
I was being rude and bratty in 12th grade Adv-Eng. class, where I was the youngest person in the room.
Can’t remember what I said, the teacher kept me after class and told me, “Just because you know something, doesn’t mean you have to express it. Sometimes being obnoxious is just being less intelligent.”
The thing is maybe you understood her that time, as your correction was indeed what she was trying to say, that won’t always be the case.
What if next time the person she makes a mistake with decides not to correct her due to politeness, but gets the wrong idea, causing delay/aggravation? This happens more and more as “alternate” (i. e. wrong) expressions get accepted to mean different things because nobody will correct anybody else any more.
Well, you learn it. Sometimes different words become different meanings to certain individuals. Like the word “fly”. It can mean, to take wing, a pesky bug, or someone that looks good.
Misuses of punctuation and spelling and the digital speak on texts and chats are not even anything I worry alot about.
My southern speech is often deemed ignorant. But, I promise you when my ol’ Granny spoke she spoke wisdom. Pure wisdom.
Old women are not necessarily wise just because they’re old. There’s a crucial point that this particular one was missing.
While we all have a natural, hard-wired instinct for language, the precise encoding of the elements of any specific language is subject to rules that have evolved and been promulgated and recorded over time. It’s literally a communications code. Violating the rules of that code requires the listener or the reader to put in extra effort to decipher the code and mentally correct it using information from context or redundancies, assuming this is even possible.
It may not seem like a big deal, especially if the corrections are so subconscious that you don’t even realize you’re doing it, but the effort is there. That’s why reading badly written text is literally tiring, and occasionally is genuinely incomprehensible no matter how much effort you put into trying to understand some garbled linguistic abomination. And it’s also annoying because it’s downright rude, especially in written material, where it reflects the fact that the writer was either too lazy to bother following the rules of language, or was too lazy to learn them in the first place, and is quite content to leave the effort of decoding up to you, the reader.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I have no problem at all with colloquialisms, internet slang and internet-inspired initialisms, and the many other linguistic quirks that pervade message boards like this one. These conform to what are in effect an implicit set of conventions that we generally all understand. What I have a problem with is native English speakers who can’t speak or write their native language, and are too fucking lazy to learn.
Yes, don’t worry your alot.
I love alots a lot! I’ve even posted many pictures of cuddly alots here! 
I’ve been through periods of being less and more pedantic for over 60 years, but the one current practice that brings an immediate comment from me is the use of the word “floor” for the ground or a roadway.
I was just getting used to younger generations stating that they picked up the dog turd from the floor at the dog park, but then I just finished a book of short stories where car accidents left blood on the “floor” (i.e., the roadway or asphalt).
When I see, read, or hear this usage, I literally stop and say the correct term out loud. “Grass!” or “Ground!” or "Sidewalk! or “Road!” or “Parking lot!” or “Sand!” or “Patio!” or “Deck!” or “Driveway!” or “Gravel!”…
And this is from someone who has to count to ten when I hear “Do you want to go with?” or “Look what I brought with!”
I just thought of another way I’m annoyingly pedantic: Hyphenation. More and more when I am reading things, particularly newspapers, it seems like the rules I was taught about using hyphenation to split words from one line of text to the next are ignored. Instead of words being split by syllables, more and more I see it done at seemingly random points. Of course, I can’t think of any specific examples at the moment.
nm, it’s been covered.
I agree. Love my alots.
I just cannot get them out of my speech or writing.
I swear. I’ve tried a lot. 
Even my auto-correct tries to make it slot, when I type it.
I live with a pendantic keyboard.
Your first sentence, “Old women are not necessarily wise because they’re old”: I know she has never claimed to be wise, and I didn’t in my post, so I’m wondering whether you feel wisdom is a prerequisite for expressing a thought, or that people who haven’t achieved wisdom (by, I guess, your criteria) can’t be right sometimes, or perhaps that you mentally interpolated the word “wise” into my post because sometimes in the past you read the phrase “wise old woman” and that popped, unbidden, into your brain while reading. If the last is the case, it may be part of your problem.
As for your second paragraph, I have to admit that you are absolutely right. It is entirely possible, even likely, that she “missed a crucial point,” i.e., did not carefully consider your theory of linguistics while she was conversing with me. However, if she had, she might point out that in some places, English, and other languages, were not evolved so much as imposed. She might also point out that evolution proceeds differently in different places, and that rule works on languages much faster than it does on animals. If she was feeling snarky, she might even say that the effort of accommodating differentiation is kind of what makes language evolution possible. You seem to be saying that the effort to learn new words and concepts, and ways to construct them, is a bad thing, not worthy of your time.
*Wolfpup:*I remember reading the prose of James Joyce and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. They were hard to understand on a first reading, and it took at lot of time and effort to understand it, and a lot of it is still a mystery to me. I used to think they were giving me a gift, new paths to send my mind down, creating new thoughts of my own. Thanks to you, I now know they were just being rude. I understand the frustration of reading poor writing that isn’t art (your entire third paragraph), but this has nothing to do with my post, which had nothing to do with written material. It had to do with correcting people who are speaking unconventionally but clearly. And the message is, don’t do that.
By the way, if someone who uses language badly is being rude because it wastes time, so is someone who uses it perfectly, if they’re also wasting the reader or auditor’s time. And there are plenty of examples of that.
I do not correct people (well except my grandkids). I think it’s pretty rude to correct someone in a conversation. Certain things bother me, but I would never say, “Hey, you didn’t “literally” knock that guy’s head off. He clearly still has his head attached.” I mean, I’m not a people person at. all. but I don’t want to be locally hated, or alienate my friends and family … except I guess, my grandkids. 
I have no evidentiary basis for judging the general wisdom of the old woman from St. Vincent. Clearly the issue here is the statement you quoted. And presumably you felt it expressed some wisdom worth quoting, else why did you post it?
My only “problem” here is with your reasoning. To be fair, a lot of it (or possibly, “alot of it” ) boils down to the never-ending battle between diehard prescriptivists and descriptivists. I consider myself to be neither. I just consider myself a pragmatist who believes that native English speakers should make some effort to gain a modicum of competency in their own language, if only as a courtesy to others.
You’ve taken a simple point about basic linguistic competency, put it in a blender and turned it into soup, and then generously seasoned it with snark.
Creative writing, especially poetry and lyrics, is in an entirely different domain from the everyday use of language for straightforward communication. So is prose in the hands of a master. Creative writing (especially verse) seeks to connect with us at a much higher and more emotional and spiritual level than mere mundane communication, much like the canvas before a brilliant painter or the orchestration of script, cinematography, and music in the hands of an accomplished film director.
But to be an effective creative writer, one has to at least master the basics first. When brilliant writers use language in unconventional ways – and many do – it’s not because they, like, don’t speak English so good. It’s because they’re masters of it.
I reject the idea that there’s any parallel between the works of accomplished writers and the solecisms of the typical dumbass who is ignorant of the basic principles of his own native language, and writes things like “I should of known …”. When F. Scott Fitzgerald employs an effective metaphor in The Great Gatsby by writing “He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room” this does not excuse the aforementioned dumbass when he writes “my head literally asploded”.
Neither do I, and I agree it’s rude, and also arrogant and pointless. When some of us (including myself) sometimes do it on this board, it’s all in fun and I think most of us understand the spirit in which it’s done. It’s the same as any other kind of nitpicking, which abounds on this board and helps to make it the great place it is!
You have to agree, it can get nasty occasionally.
Some folks can be very hurtful with one line jabs.
When the vultures are tearing down the poster. The poster who may or may not deserve it.
I hate to see it (yes, I’ve actually done it, too) still, I don’t like it.
I’m nice like that.
My major frustration is people who do not stick to the topic in threads. By his I mean using the thread about their own private conversation. Not using the reply button, thus derailing the thread.
No, not any more. I learned to type on an old-fashioned typewriter and it was ingrained in us to always use two spaces after a period. But that was changed around in the late 2010s when the MLA, APA, and CMOS suggested one space after end of sentence punctuation. It took me a few months to get used to this new rule.
Clockwise always is from where you are standing or sitting. I learned this because it’s how you teach herding dogs to go in the direction you want them to. There’s no right and left in herding directions, only clockwise and counter clockwise, because herding is a movement of circles, with you and the dog being on the rim and the sheep in the middle.
But the judgement of whether a given circular motion is clockwise or counterclockwise is (usually) from the point of view of a non-existent observer who is hovering above the entire scene. But expressing things from the point of view of an observer who is below the scene is just as correct, and they would see the same motion as being the opposite sense.