{"id":715,"date":"2016-07-21T13:36:55","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T17:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=715"},"modified":"2016-07-20T13:44:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T17:44:44","slug":"maybe-just-dont-be-a-dick-about-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2016\/07\/maybe-just-dont-be-a-dick-about-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Just Don&#8217;t Be a Dick About Grammar?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">This is a little video about dropping the pretensions and just <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Singular_they\">returning to using &#8220;They\/Them&#8221; as the singular non-gendered pronoun<\/a>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It&#8217;s a fun video, but the Big Picture is this:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">English is a fantastically error-tolerant language.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>You can construct <b>fantastically <\/b>agrammatical sentences and still be sufficiently understood to get things done.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Optimizing around tiny matters of correctness (e.g., &#8220;<i>unique<\/i> can never take a modifier,&#8221; &#8220;never end a sentence with a preposition,&#8221; and so on) usually fails to bring any substantive increase in the clarity of your speech or writing. Insisting that others do so as well&#8211;especially when there is no legitimate confusion created by their chosen construction&#8211;usually means you are acting like a classist dickweed (plausibly because you are one).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>THE TAKEAWAY:<\/strong> <em><span class=\"s1\">At best, perfect &#8220;grammatical correctness&#8221;\u2014like taking a good long shit\u2014is (and should be) an entirely private pleasure.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It&#8217;s not for polite conversation among civilized people like you and me.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; overflow: hidden;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fbaltimoresun%2Fvideos%2F10154331580434712%2F&amp;show_text=0&amp;width=560\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a little video about dropping the pretensions and just returning to using &#8220;They\/Them&#8221; as the singular non-gendered pronoun.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a fun video, but the Big Picture is this: English is a fantastically error-tolerant language.\u00a0 You can construct fantastically agrammatical sentences and still be sufficiently understood to get things done.\u00a0 Optimizing around tiny matters &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2016\/07\/maybe-just-dont-be-a-dick-about-grammar\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Maybe Just Don&#8217;t Be a Dick About Grammar?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11],"tags":[57,25],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}