However, English is not French. There are not “rules”. Just guidelines, and there are a number of those, and they differ- mostly in small details, true.
Generally when someone complains about the stupidity of other people’s grammar, it is when those “stupid people” dont follow the “rules”- those 'rules" being just the ones that the complainer knows and chooses to follow. It then follows that if the complainer doesnt know or chooses not to follow a certain “rule” then it is because that rule is “unimportant”. But if someone else doesnt know or chooses not to follow a certain “rule”, then that person is stupid.
In the title, “whom” is the subject, and “grammar” is the object. Therefore, a grammatically correct title would either read, “Who killed grammar?” or “Grammar was killed by whom?”
And I did mention the general culture, which will also vary by social strata etc. It’s not only the school, but yes, the schooling is very different: look for threads containing “tree analysis”. A tool I can still use 24 years after having had to use it in class is completely unknown to Americans; the grammatical analysis tools commonly used in the US were barely brushed over and aside in my classes (we used them once, said “this is a piece of shit since it shatters the sentence” and moved on to trees). The tools which have been described here as commonly used in the US take any sentence and reorder it into a list of words from which it’s impossible to rebuild the original; those we used don’t move a letter. We learned to recognize the subject whether it was ellided, at the beginning, after the verb or hidden behind one of the complements; for Americans, it is only too common to reach college unable to consciously write a sentence in the passive voice, much less a lab report. I taught 2xx-level college courses for a total of 10 semesters: the students who knew what the passive voice is and could use it seamlessly were an absurd minority; organic chemistry lab shouldn’t have to dedicate half an hour each semester to an explanation of the passive voice!
Us shot the grammar, but we did not shoot the syntact’ly.
Us shot the grammar, but we did not shoot the syntact’ly.
All around in ours mass noun
They’re trying to make we frown.
They say they want we to speak correctly
For the killing of a syntact’ly,
For the life of a syntact’ly.
But us say:
Us shot the grammar, but us swear it was in past tense.
Us shot the grammar, and they say it is a future perfect tense.
No, it isn’t meaningless. You may disagree with it, which would make you wrong, but it isn’t meaningless.
It means that grammar, as an actual academic discipline as opposed to a random collection of pet peeves, is founded upon observation. It derives data from observing how people actually communicate, not inventing arbitrary rules and whining when nobody cares what some badly-educated pseudo-grammarian thinks about how they communicate.
The ‘random collection of pet peeves’ is properly called ‘style’, and, as style is a function of fashion, it is entirely prescriptive and prone to changing with the breeze. Unless you think a wooden building cannot possibly be dilapidated.
I’m sure that, to many people who write professionally for large organizations, e.g. journalists and newswriters, grammar is highly prescriptive.
It’s a matter of degree. At a certain point questions of grammar are hard to separate from questions of usage and vocabulary; to facilitate communication we all have to agree on what the overwhelming majority words in the language are “supposed” to mean. It can be the same with grammar; many of us can probably go for weeks without ever using the pluperfect, but it’s nice to be able to use it as needed to avoid ambiguity.
WAG about where it started? The 60s (fount of all evil in modern times, LOL). Not only did sloppy-talkin’ youth get a major boost-up in society, so did women. Wait, you say - women tend to use better grammar, no? Yes, but when too many of them got into the workforce, they turned professions like editing and copyediting into “women’s jobs” - ie: devalued work. A few decades of that and caring about good English too became devalued, taking on a tinge of the effete and maybe even effeminate.