> I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something

Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:

> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.

or

> * I tried and finished the assignment

or

> * Try always and tell the truth

What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".

Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.

Yep "correctness" only exists contextually. A language teacher can say "no that's wrong" with the implied meaning of "that doesnt follow the patterns of the dialect I'm teaching you". Ditto for newspaper editors and their house style.

But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.

In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.

(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)

I've thought a lot about this one. It really is the message that matters, not the grammar. It's the song, not the notes.

It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.

Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.

Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.

As far as grammar is concerned, yes, that's true.

But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.

Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.

Yes and constantly obstructing communication is annoying and boring!

Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.

As a EE wannabe, I see everything in terms of impedance matching. It's all a very high dimension matching problem we tend to get good at, in order to survive.

That depends on the purpose of your writing.

https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

> there is truly no correct way to say something

Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.

"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.

Sure, but you do still have to try and get your point across.

I think we can all agree of "5 items or fewer" though right

(jk)

I think of language like a lossy encoder-decoder system.

You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.

I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.