OT: what's with the 'i'?

[Joe Zeff]

On 02/01/2013 04:52 PM, Craig White wrote:
> It's clear that you want this e-mail list, informal as it is to respect
> your sense of proper grammar.

No, it's not "his sense of proper grammar," it's proper grammar as it's 
been taught in schools in every English speaking country for over a 
century now.

As I see it, there are three reasons people's grammar on this list falls 
short.  This is an international list and not all of the members have 
English as their first (or even second) language.  My attitude is that 
they're doing the best they can and as long as I can work out what they 
originally meant, that's all that matters.  Second, there are native 
English speakers who either were never taught properly in school (I have 
a friend who has trouble with homonyms, using "flue" for "flew" and 
other such errors because of problems when she was young.)  And, of 
course, there are the people who were exposed to proper grammar, syntax 
and word usage but simply don't care.  On some mailing lists, people in 
both of the latter two groups would be flamed for their errors.  On this 
one, I keep my opinions to myself because I can't see any way it could 
possibly help and many ways it could end up making trouble for everybody.

Now, of course, we're in a long, OT discussion of the issue and I think 
that if nothing else, it's let all of us who don't like bad grammar to 
air our opinions instead of bottling them up as we'd normally do.  No, I 
don't expect this to result in any change, but who knows; somebody might 
decide to be more careful because they'd never realized how it looks to 
others.