We all know grammar Nazis. What incorrect grammar are you completely in defence of?

My philosophy is that languages are made up to make communication easier and they change all the time anyway. So as long as you are understood, that's more important than getting the grammar to be perfect. Getting it like 80% right is plenty and that last 20% consists of a bunch of obscure or ambiguous rules that would take up way too much of my processing power to keep track of while communicating, thus hindering the purpose of using language in the first place. Also, English is a stupid mess of a language. I don't have enough respect for it to follow all of it's rules.

That said... what DOES bug me a little is people who make videos who regularly misuse words. Not because I think it's that big of a deal, but... come on... this is your job and you have complete control over the work at every step of the way and have so many opportunities to correct mistakes. You write the script. You read it. You watch it again while doing editing and could easily re-record bits that are wrong or awkward. Although perhaps this is less about the language specifically and more about leaving mistakes and bloopers in videos in general. That's what editing is for. We have more advanced editing tools available to the average person than ever before. USE THEM!

"Y'all"

I will die on the hill that it's more efficient and neutral than the alternatives.

English has to bend over backwards to make up for the fact that it doesn't have a natural plural 2nd person form.
Ye Y'all Youse (Dublin)
For years I have said that y'all is the best thing to come out of the south.
- Yinz is at least as efficient
"Y'all" and the plural "all y'all" are part of my daily vocabulary. And I'm in no way of southern origin.
First we're all like "Thou is too casual, gotta use the plural second person instead." Then oh no, turns out number in pronouns is actually useful sometimes, but thou sounds old fashioned now, so we just gotta re-pluralize the second person. And then you get y'all.
I like y'all, but I almost wish we could just bring thou back.
I recently realized that w’all needs to be shakespeared too. Following the pattern of other languages, y’all and w’all are missing in English.
Also, I shakespeared the verb shakespeared, in reference to Shakespeare making up new words by following patterns among other words.
- I won't argue against w'all. I'm fine with it in principle. But it's not something I think I've ever said, or ever heard anyone say.

Y'all is completely fine to use. It was a mistake for English to lose its distinction between second person singular and plural. Either we accept the word "y'all" or we go back to saying thou and thee, either way we can't just keep on awkwardly dancing around not having a distinction between second person plural and singular.

I will always use “who” because “whom” gives off too much of a Reddit vibe.

Period AFTER the end of a quote.

My buddy Joe told me “I will live and die on this hill”.

Absolutely. Anyone who has done any programming should recognize that changing what's in the quote is corrupting the data.
If I'm quoting a question though, then it makes sense to include the question mark in the quote.

I laughed when Joe asked "That's the hill you chose?".
If the murky depths of my memories of school is correct, the location of the period is dictated by whether or not it is part of the quote. So, if the quote should have a period at the end, it goes inside the quotation marks. If the quote does not include the period (e.g. you are quoting part of a sentence), but you are at the end of a sentence in your own prose, you put the period on the outside of the quotation marks.
Ugh, there should be one before AND after!
- So is this correct?
  My buddy Joe told me. “I will live and die on this hill”.
- I hate how much I agree with you in principle and how ugly it looks in practice. With doubled periods, at least - different marks don’t trigger that same reaction. For example, a question mark inside, followed by a period or comma outside feels right.
For me in American English it's also the commas that go inside the closing quotation marks, even when they're not part the original quote. I die a little every time I see this, so illogical.
If it's not part of the quote, just leave it outside.
I'm shocked no one else pointed this out. This isn't a rule of grammar — this is a style rule, which isn't actually part of the English language. Different style guides recommend different things. This happens to be specifically delineated by American/Canadian style guides vs British/Australian style guides; however anyone could publish a style guide. If USA Today decided to make and publish a style guide that they used in their articles that said there should be periods both within and after a quote, that would be valid by that styleguide.
So wait, you don't care, or you think it should be done a certain way? OP asked what doesn't matter to you at all.
Isn't that how it's done in English (Traditional)?

Using commas, wherever you want.

They should be logical thought breaks, not adhere to any rules of grammar.

I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you'd, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.
- Found Christopher Walkin.
This one I'm so guilty of, it just seems fine when used in moderation, even if I know it's wrong.
I've always just used them where natural breaks would be if the sentence was spoken. I know how it's supposed to be used and I'll do it correctly when writing papers, but it hurts inside to see it that way. I don't understand how it improves comprehension.
I can't read things comfortably with too many commas. My internal monologue stops at each if them.

Putting the punctuation outside the quotes (or parentheses) when the quote is only part of a sentence. I.e. He said "I need to go now".

informal contractions are simply informal just because. there’s no real reason to consider them informal or not standard other than arbitrary rules.

“You shouldn’t’ve done that.” “It couldn’t’ve been him!” “I might’ve done that if you asked.”

I think if I took it too far and said that all contractions are basically acceptable, y'all'd'n't've agreed with me.
- This looks aggressively welsh.
- I’d’n’t’ve had a single issue with it. In fact, I quite enjoy multi-contractions
- I use this one unironically lol
Y’all’d’n’t’ve is one of my favorites
Isn't formality itself a bunch of arbitrary rules? There's rarely anything about any formality rule that makes the thing itself inherently more or less polite, the point is that choosing to follow those arbitrary rules communicates that you are (or aren't) choosing to be formal about the thing. It's like a giant tone marker for "respectfully"
I consider the arbitrary rules that we call formal English to just be the set of rules that lead to the most widely understood texts, so if you want to reach a broad audience, both across the world and across time, then keeping to those formal rules makes sense.
This is the one that still ends up in my technical writing.

I'm of the opinion that so long as it is understandable it does not matter. English was once written as it sounded and there was no spelling consistancy. Those who were literate had little issue with it.

Edit: Okay my rant is more related to spelling than grammar but still interesting.

Deliberately not capitalising proper nouns as a show of disrespect (countries, people, titles, etc). Not "grammatically correct" but I think it falls under freedom of expression.

A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their 'mistakes' have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.

There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:
"He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old" (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
“How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s'appelle? I think German too)
“I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
“She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.
- The use of 'in' and 'on' for various vehicles in English is one that I always find interesting. Like you're on a motorbike, or a boat, or a bus, but you're in a car. Aeroplanes I think are kind of interchangeable.
  Also the order of descriptive words for things is one I really find odd. "I'm on a big red old-fashioned London bus" = coherent sentence. "I'm in a red London big old-fashioned bus" = nonsense.
  Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
  Also how something like the word 'jam' can mean a fruit preserve, a door that's stuck, traffic that's not moving, playing music or cramming something into a hole lol.
- In German that question is: Wie nennt man das?
  Or literally: How does one call that?

My pet peeve is people thinking they are being clever by complaining about the supposed incorrect usage of literally as figuratively.

People, including famous authors, have been literally (not hyperbole) using the word as an intensifier, and therefore, figuratively, since 1847, e.g. F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray.

Did we change the definition of 'literally'? | Merriam-Webster - https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

This one is great.

Passive voice is completely fine to use.

Not only is it fine, but it's the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.
The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have "reagent A was mixed with reagent B", not "I mixed reagent A and reagent B".
An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., "Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask".
Who says it's not?
(/s)

Anything that is used colloquially but technically isn't correct because some loser didn't like it 200 years ago. To boldly keep on splitting infinitives is a rejection of language prescriptivism!

It's not a grammar mistake per se, but I feel like sharing it and it is close enough so here we go.

As a non-native English speaker: How can you have mopb and vacuum the floor but not broom the room?! I know it doesn't exist, but I don't care. If we have to phrase it as a grammar mistake: I use verbalisations where they are uncommon.

It's "mop"
- Not if you bring your thugs
I agree. I'm going to start brooming the room. Thank you for this insight.
While "broom the floor" isn't common, "sweep the floor" is. Of course, why we use the tool name as a verb in the case of "mop" or "vacuum", but not in the case of "broom", is another case of English being English. But, you shouldn't expect consistency out of English. It's not really a language, it's several languages dressed up in a trench-coat pretending to be one.

Singular they. I've had this opinion since long before I even knew about non-binary people. Using "he or she" to refer to a person without specifying gender is clunky as hell.

but singular they isn't incorrect in the least. anyone claiming otherwise has some agenda to push in spite of the facts of it's use for a good long while
- It's not, but with... Political views as they are, it's gotten a lot of pushback. People don't even realize they use it regularly.
  "Someone called for you"
  "What did they want?"
  Bam. Easy. I was stoked when magic the gathering changed card wording from "he or she" to "they" because it cleans up the wording so much.

I am not in defence of but actually annoyed by:

Using if instead of whether. For example: "I will check if the window is open". This means: "if the window is open, I will check". What people mean to say is "I will check whether the window is open".

Also, using was in hypotheticals instead of the correct were. For example: if I were going to check whether the window was open, I wouldn't be standing here. Not "if I was going to check [...]".

Ah good one. Less vs fewer is another like this. IDGAF the distinction there either
- I do. If it's countable, it's fewer. Fewer people, fewer houses. If it's incountable it's less. Less rice, less water.

I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don't think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, "he's coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning," as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, "he's coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning."

I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it's a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated

Dashes, of all kinds need to fucking die, die, die.
While not completely fair, my burning hatred of dashes comes for word processing applications automatically replacing hyphens and especially double hyphens in code with dashes. And this never gets caught until said code needs to be copy-pasted back into a functional application, and it fails. Sometimes in weird and horrible ways. So, while it's the auto-replace which causes the problem, the existence of dashes is proximate enough that they all need to be burned out of existence for all time.
- You've given me a horrible flashback to the time I took two hours to figure out that some code wasn't working because someone else's copy/paste had, somehow, introduced a few zero-width spaces that I did not think to check for
  But yes, I agree that using just one character for all three of those would be fine for general purposes and easier in specific fields. I think I'd prefer the en dash to be the default since it's the middle ground size, but to be honest as long as we don't need to start using em dashes as hyphens for very—wide—compounds I'd be happy
Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don't manually add spaces, but most don't do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.
oh no
oh no I apparently feel very strongly that you're wrong here
You're right that m-dashes should be spaced, of course. But there's a big difference between an m-dash and an n-dash, and you used the wrong one in your example. An m-dash, like a semi colon or colon, is for separating two related clauses — there's never at time when you should use two in the same sentence. Whereas n-dashes are used for parantheticals –sub-clauses that can't stand on their own– and should, like round brackets or quotation marks, have spaces on the outside but not the inside.

I dont care about capitalizations, apostrophes, or if you shorthand words like tho as long as i can understand what youre saying from the context

Do u rembr txt spk? It ws vry anyng 2 read n 2 rite.
- w8 r u srs

Ending a sentence with a proposition is just fine. Picky people whom I've only seen parodies of on the Internet go "oh you ended your sentence with a preposition I have no idea what you mean by 'He went in' maybe you could explain what he went into? A jello mold? A ditch? What did go into?"

You asked if he went into the store and I said he went in, you know what I meant because of CONTEXT CLUES.

I've never met anyone who's ever been this picky but I'm ready to bite them if I ever find one.

It’s not grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s a common misconception that it is a rule, basically because one guy argued in favor of it back in the 1600s and had some support for formal writing in the 1700s. But it’s never been a broad rule, and even in formal contexts it’s not a rule in any current, reputable style or usage guides (so far as I know, at least).
Some more info on the topic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/prepositions-ending-a-sentence-with
- I only know of this "rule" because of a joke.
  A new student is looking for the library and stops a passing professor to ask, "Excuse me sir, can you please tell me where the library is at?" To which the professor responds, "Here at Harvard, we don't end our sentences with prepositions."
  The student without missing a beat says "I'm sorry, can you please tell me where the library is at, asshole?"
  (Not sure if I remember exactly how it should be written it, apologies if I got it wrong)
I love to end my sentences with a proposition, you wanna fuck?
- What makes that a proposition and not a simple question?
Did you mean to say, preposition instead of proposition?
- I think that since you're aware of typos and context clues you knew that was the case.

In German there's the saying "macht Sinn", which is wrong since it's just a direct translation of "makes sense". Correct would be "ergibt Sinn", in English "results in sense", but I don't care, "macht Sinn" rolls off the tongue easier.

Macht sinn to me.
which is wrong
Which is also just prescriptive bullshit perpetuated by grammar nazis
https://www.sprachlog.de/2009/01/12/seit-wann-machen-wir-im-deutschen-sinn/
I think if something gets said a certain way for a period of over a hundred years, maybe it's time to accept it as a normal way to say things
- Exactly, it's perfectly kromulent.

aluminum

This is a correct spelling. Not the only correct spelling, but one of them
- I will also die on the hill that its incorrect

Sometimes a sentence ending with a proposition just sounds better.

That is not sharing grammar rules. Is just something we were all incorrectly taught.
Agreed. Sometimes, a sentence that ends with a preposition sounds weird. Oftentimes, a sentence that has been completely rearranged to not end in a preposition sounds weird.

I'm really sick of people treating AAVE and other dialects like grammar mistakes, is what. Grammar Nazis indeed, protecting the purity of the English language.

Anything is acceptable if it's for comedic effect.

In Dutch you're supposed to write "Volgens mij" ("in my opinion"), but it's pronounced more like it's one word. So I feel "volgensmij" flows better

volgens mei niet!

'irregardless' and improper 'begs the question' are both fine.

I hate these, but acknowledge that the battle is lost
- My body will be on the hill of the latter.
Can you explain what improper "begs the question" looks like...?
- "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy wherein "the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true.". However, "begs the question" is used more as where something creates a question.
  So by the original "because the earth is flat the planet is not rotating." You assume the earth is flat to justify your point of no rotation. Whereas the common usage "the flat earth theory and other science conspiracies beg the question of why people don't drop dead by forgetting to breathe." Flat earth theory created questions about human intelligence.
- I guess it would be when something doesn't actually lead one logically to a question? Idk
Irregardless means what? It's a double negative, so it's "regardful"?

Im over spellcheck on phones. I'll look the other way when something is typed all wacky from a phone.

I can't stand the amount of times my phone tries to force apostrophes into places that don't need them. So many plurals that should just end in " s " become " 's ". "Were" also gets changed to "we're" despite it not making any sense in context.
Also, separate issue, but it seems like autocorrect can almost never comprehend the possibility that I hit the wrong button for the first letter of a word.
Spellcheck on my phone often tries to spellcheck my usernames and passwords, but I can't work out how to turn it off.
- If your phone isn't learning that your username is correct, there's probably a "personal dictionary" you can add it to so it doesn't get flagged.

What incorrect grammar are you completely in defence of?

Ending a sentence on a preposition :3c

Well what should I end them on?
- Nice :D

Being excessively prescriptive or nitpicky about the prohibition on ending sentences on a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.

Edit: I misread the topic, it says "in defence of", but for some reason I got it backward.
My answer is about the simple grammar I would lile to see more respected.
I leave my original answer for context.

Anyways instead of Anyway
your instead of you're
their instead or they're and a couple others...

2 and 3 are horrible though. These completely change the meaning of a sentence :(
- Thanks for the heads up, I just realize I got the topic backward! That's embarassing... Hence my message has been downvoted lol, now I can see why.

Most of it, as long as it's understandable I don't care. Language is about making yourself understood.

using clauses instead of full sentences, with proper punctuation;

I'm perfectly fine with pretty loosey-goosey interpretations of when to use semi-colons. I realize that there is a specific use-case, but in reality it's just used for the most part as a sort of elongated comma; where the intention in the writing is to have a longer pause than a normal comma would.

And I'm absolutely fine with that. No one is really clear on the real semi-colon usage anyway. I'm relatively sure that the last sentance in the previous paragraph is the actual correct usage technically, but who knows? And more importantly, who cares?

That's not how you use a semi-colon; you use it when you want to show a logical connection between what would otherwise be two separate sentences.
- Exactly my point. In my brain, that's exactly how I used it. The two statements were logically related, but were separate statements. The fact that the second statement didn't have it's own subject-object-verb is (in my mind) irrelevant.

The word "muchly"

Kinda like aimee mann - deathly.

All of them, unless there's need to be accurate.

Its efficiency ‘hello’ to me is an empty word. But I am not going to say, “How do you do?” to someone to start a conversation. so saying, ‘howdy’ is the hill I am dying on.

To me, "hello" communicates that you would like a verbal interaction and gives the opportunity to mentally switch gears for it before it actually begins. I appreciate that it exists.
- Thank God "ahoy ahoy" never took off.

Edit: I misread the topic, it says "in defence of", but for some reason I got it backward. My answer is about the simple grammar I would lile to see more respected. I leave my original answer for context.

Edit: I misread the topic, it says "in defence of", but for some reason I got it backward.
My answer is about the simple grammar I would lile to see more respected.
I leave my original answer for context.