So…
I can blame my poor writing skills on youse SDMB people?
Nothing wrong here, either in the textbooks or the style guides that I use. Modern usage, however, generally prohibits “which” in cases where “who” can be used, though this is found in the King James version of the Bible (“Our Father, which art in heaven…”).
From my own observations, not everyone here is the next potential Orwell. 
I think we all speak in dialects, and that they’re more likely to be class dialects today than ethnic or even regional.
Listen any time an enlisted military person is interviewed on TV. They speak in a dialect. They pronounce the same words the same ways, speak in a similar fast pace and even tone.
What used to be good grammar is becoming a dialect too. Not high-class, just kind of a sheltered academic middle-class.
I’m a judgmental descriptivist. What a prescriptivist might call “bad grammar”, I call “the way a stupid person talks”.
It’s a marker, is all. I personally prefer “Our Father, what am in heaven…” because people get your drift anyway you say it, amirite?
Jesus Christ! There is another stab right there!
I don’t think Jesus Christ needs your instruction in where the stabs go. :rolleyes:
My written grammar is miles ahead of my spoken grammar. I tend to pick up the dialects around me, too. As a consequence I’m somewhere between Chicago Inland Northern English and Louisiana African American Vernacular English right now. This results in some truly bizarre-sounding sentences coming out of my mouth sometimes.
This.
Before the net, loose for lose didn’t exist and cads got their just deserts, as is right and proper. Next thing you know, loose for lose will be an OED alternative spelling, only three letters and a couple of pages from it’s for its.
Muliply loose for lose and it’s for its by Ten thousand with a capital T and that rhymes with D and that stands for Descriptivist Degenerates.
It’s River City all over again.
I think you mean “what there trying too say.” Your welcome.
Blasphemy!
Is no one goingg to tell him that babby did it??
Completely agree. One real sin was to make up the “shall/will” rule out of whole cloth, thereby destroying a really useful distinction. To me, for example, “I shall return” means that I am determined to, but the idiot grammarians will claim its the simple future. Other rules that bug the hell out of me are to never split an infinitive and that prepositions should not be used to end a sentence with. (Okay, that’s a lousy example.) These are fake rules based on the idea that Latin was perfect and the grammar of English should be modeled on that of Latin even though the fit was awful.
Back in early 1964 some wrote a book called, “The Lyndon Johnson Story”. (BTW, putting that . inside the quote is another of my pet peeves. It wasn’t there in the original so putting inside creates a misquotation.) It was reviewed in the NY Times and the very first sentence complained about the title, saying something like, “In English you don’t modify a noun with a noun.” I never read the rest of that review because I decided that I had nothing to learn from a guy who was so unaware of the basic principles of his (presumably) native language. There are few things so characteristic of English as the use of nouns attributively. And so useful. Contrast “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” with “Organization de la Traité de l’Atlantique du Nord”.
Much is bilingual in Canada, including the prosaic, such as instructions printed on the underside of top-loading washing-machine lids. The French instructions are invariably three to five lines longer. The material in French printed on breakfast-cereal boxes is invariable longer than is the English (and sometimes in a smaller typeface so it will fit), as is any other printed material in English and French that can be compared side by side.
A couple of weeks ago a fluent English- and French-speaking friend who, in addition to his regular job sometimes works as a translator, said he and bilingual friends usually text each other in English though their mother tongue is French because English is 20 per cent shorter. The number may be suspect, but his comment reinforces the assertion that English is more compact than French.
I can’t say whether this is as true with any other western language when compared with English, but I suspect it is.
But the French make up for it by only pronouncing half the letters. 
The studies I’ve seen on electronic communications and ability to write either find no strong correlation or a slight positive correlation between high use of electronic communication and above average literacy skills. One study found “In a million and a half words of IM discourse among 71 teenagers, the use of short forms, abbreviations, and emotional language is infinitesimally small, less than 3% of the data.”
In fact, use of textspeak is often derided by today’s youth as something adults to in attempts to be cool.
I didn’t think there was much argument about English being compact. We readily eschew prepositions, articles and other small words. We use contractions, acronyms, portmanteaus, and every other form of reducing the word count and size. English is the great open source language project. Grammarians are the only users of English who have failed to do their part to make the language more efficient, more universal, and both proscriptive and descriptive.
I don’t believe you.
Don’t be ridiculous. It’s always the butler…