Who you gonna call?

I am always amused at the English teacher establishment, those little ladies that run around in tennis shoes and ankle length skirts, usually short in stature.  I think they have little-man syndrome even though they are female.  They want to call the shots on what gets said and written by people everywhere.

Juxtapose that picture of a person against the one who wears Hawaiian shirts, shorts and sandals and who, with great swagger, says that a native speaker can't be wrong.  The two are polar opposites. 

Of course, no one ever controls language development, written or spoken.  Language just doesn't work that way.  About 88% of people finish high school, and only about 28% of people finish college.  So what kind of person is it that thinks knowing all the rules about language really gets them anywhere in life?  Yet, if I go to the website of Grammarly.com, I see all kinds of promises using the bandwagon approach of propaganda.  They even advertise that linguists have built their site.  While that may be true (because linguists have been working on making machines detect and use natural language), they make it sound as if linguists endorse the premise of this site with all of its rules, promises, and judgmental attitudes toward the average person who speaks English (which represents about 72% of the people if not graduating from college is the criterion).

Linguists know better.  They know how language works; they're the scientists of language. Grammarians, on the other hand, are those people who want to control language and judge rather harshly all who have inferior knowledge to their own.

The real kicker to me is the main boon of the Grammarly.com website.  The site claims to make you a better writer.  Are these people going to be surprised when in a few short years writing will be relegated to the world of captions and single word identifications!

While there will probably always be little ladies in long skirts and tennis shoes feeling good about trying to police the language they hear and see, people of that ilk will dwindle in the face of the need for using video to record and apps to transmit how real people communicate, the 72% who relate to working, making money, and using communication that meets their needs very adequately.  People aren't calling grammarians to help them - they're calling those who can write... in code.

The people in Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and sandals aren't surprised one bit about this!