Why Do Experts Always Defend Language Mistakes

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The safest side of the road to drive on is the one that other drivers expect you to be driving on

The British drive on the left; the Americans drive on the right; being a Canadian, I compromise and drive in the middle.

I noticed an author using "would of" and "should of" in a novel, and at first I thought it was an editing mistake. But no, she did it only for particular characters as a way of expressing their youth, informality, and lack of education. I found that really cool! It's not a distinction that exists in spoken English, but when deliberately chosen in writing, it clearly conveys something about the speaker. Really taking advantage of those unconscious associations we have.

I noticed a long time ago that if I'm driving in the slow lane, I get annoyed at someone who expects me to move over for them without checking, but if I'm on an onramp, I get annoyed if someone doesn't make space for me to get in. And the 2 different things can happen 2 minutes apart without the hypocrisy jumping out at me. It's astonishing how much we assume virtue on our own parts.

Reminds me of this gem I saw online ages ago: People who don't know anything about linguistics: The plural of memorandum is memoranda, why can't people get it right? When you know a little about linguistics: The plural of memorandum should just be memorandums because that's how people naturally say it, memoranda is just prescriptivism. When you know a lot about linguistics: Oh my god? So certain English words borrowed from Latin and Greek have competing plural forms, with one form using the English plural -s and the other using a borrowed Latin or Greek form? Do you realize how crazy that is - a language borrowing from inflectional morphology from another language? And here the two competing plural forms have become markers of education, expertise, and social class, isn't that incredible? When you have a degree in lingustics and dgaf anymore: memorandibles

As the linguist said to the amateur language scold, “What makes you Saussure?”

There is a legend when the first person to speak the first sentence in modern English, the person next to them corrected their grammar!

The message of this video holds true about far more than linguistics.

I thought the answer to the car question was going to be "whatever direction the other cars are going, because otherwise you'll crash!" - highlighting the importance of language just as a means of communication, so that you'd say whatever goes along with those that you talk to rather than whatever is "optimal", I guess

My favorite Lingthusiasm quote: "Not judging your grammar, just analyzing it."

I'm not sure which of my eyes is dominant, so I always drive with my eyes closed just to be safe.

A major humbling moment for me was when I found out that shortening "the car needs to be washed" to "the car needs washed" was a feature of my local dialect despite the fact that I had always assumed I spoke the most objectively correct and popular form of American English. From there, I have slowly been learning to appreciate language from a descriptivist perspective rather than a prescriptive one, and it's made it a lot easier for me to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of this language :)

In brazilian Portuguese, the combo "why" + "because" has four different forms, "por que", "por quê", "porque" and "porquê", all of which have the exact same pronunciation, and the situations in which they are used differ quite subtly: "Por que" means "why" and is non-terminal. "Por quê" means "why" and is terminal (i.e. used at the end of a sentence). "Porque" means "because". "Porquê" means "reason" or "motive". This is infamously an object of frustration for students and language teachers alike, and most people when writing informally (and sometimes formally) just can never get it right (for self-evident reasons). Recently I discovered that european Portuguese only has two forms: "porque" and "porquê", with the former covering all first three use cases of brazilian Portuguese. (To be precise, "por que" does exist in european Portuguese, but it's more like "by which", so another beast entirely.) Since then, I have never even subconsciously tried to follow the brazilian way. Don't care. I'm right. The rules are wrong.

I come to this channel to learn about driving, sir, not to have my biases and arrogance thrown in my face

My journey from being a total grammarnazi to finding mistakes not only fascinating but also reflective of our own language's contradictions and shortcomings has been incredibly enriching and powerful for many other aspects in my life. A language is certainly a whole worldview!

I always just say, "If you understood well enough to correct, you understood well enough to not need to correct." The rational response to a language mistake would be "I don't understand" or "I'm having trouble understanding you, did you mean [rephrase]?" The emotional response, of course, is to gatekeep language and negatively stereotype speakers/writers who are different from you. :) Only time I correct language is when it's clearly ESL, and then it's in the form of "I would say that as [rephrase], if you're looking for that kind of feedback."

Fabulous video - thank you! We have a fascinating thing happening here in South East Wales where the largely English speaking population use "non-standard" Welsh pronunciations for local place names. This is an area that lost its Welsh quite rapidly during the industrial revolution and also happens to be one of the more working class, low income parts of the country. Growing up, we frequently got called being "lazy" or accused of "bastardising" the Welsh language. This still happens now. I carried this judgement most of my life and am ashamed to say that, once I became more fluent in Welsh, I was part of the movement that looked down and corrected people on how they said places like "Pencoed" or "Treoes". I was well into my 30s before I learned that these "mispronunciations" are actually the ghosts of the local Welsh dialect - y Wenhwyseg / Gwentian - that thrived here before the 1800s. This was well before either "standard" Welsh or English graced these lands. Ironically, the English-speaking native residents are retaining the original Welsh pronunciations, not the other way around. Gosh, I love language ❤️

Since I became a language nerd, this is the scariest thing that I've learned. Mistakes and changes are baked into the language and often become the new norm when enough people start making them. As long as the other person understands you with no problem, your language is correct, no matter what the dictionary says.

My initial answer was "It's safer to drive on the left in England, safer to drive on the right in the US."