I don’t see many comments to that effect. Let me agree that linguistic correctness, i.e. an attempt to use the rules of formal grammar when communicating, has nothing to do with insecurity. I would loosely hypothesize that “attempting to be linguistically correct” usually corresponds pretty well to “being sensibly cautious about communicating in an appreciable way that will be understood.”

I would suggest that certain specific quirks or deviations from communicative norms, such as inordinate hedging, suggest or connote a degree of personal insecurity. I believe this is one good reason to encourage people (within the constraints of social propriety and common sense, of course!) to adopt grammatical norms that help promote preferable characteristics, like comfortable expression of self-assurance.

So, let me get this straight:

Shorter Eszter: “I receive many communications which have this grammatical quirk, which makes it more difficult to comprehend what the person intends to say.”

Shorter Keith: “There is no standard for correctness other than comprehension, so Eszter is wrong to complain.”

A non-native speaker criticizing the supposed ubiquitous “errors” of native speakers is deeply misguided.

Is it correct to infer that you believe all non-native speakers of English are second-class human beings, who do not have the rights to criticize that native English speakers do? I can’t see any other reason for the characteristics you mentioned to automatically imply “deeply misguided.”

A non-native speaker criticizing the supposed ubiquitous “errors” of native speakers is deeply misguided.

Toward the end of the thread (which was mostly about something else entirely) a commenter named Dave Eddyshaw asserts that in his idiolect, “I” is used only when it stands alone; “me” is the proper subject form in compound subjects. He knows that’s “wrong,” of course, but it’s what comes naturally to him.

So if his instinctive grasp of the language is common, then for many people, “John and I went to the store” is intuitively wrong, and they have to be taught to say it. But once they’re taught, they tend to correct “the cookies were for John and me” to “the cookies were for John and I,” because their intuitive grasp of English tells them never to use “I” in compounds, but their school learning tells them that they are supposed to use “I” in compounds. When they are taught that “John and me went to to the store” is wrong, they don’t understand that it’s wrong because “John and me” is the subject. They assume it’s wrong because you’re supposed to use “I” in compounds. So once they are taught to use it compounds they tend to use ‘I’ whenever there’s a compound, whether it’s a subject or an object. This sort of hyper-correction occurs when people are taught that something is wrong, but they never quite understand why it’s wrong, and it’s common in other contexts as well.

“Oh no! I missed my train by 10 seconds!” “You should have been here earlier, shouldn’t you.”

“I’m really full.” “You shouldn’t eat so much, should you.”

“I’m not doing well in chem this term.” “If you’d study more you’d do better, wouldn’t you.”

They really do it. God, it’s annoying.

Also, just to clarify, it tends to be native English speakers who make this mistake in my circles. This applies elsewhere, too. I seem to be way better in being able to use “whom” correctly than many of my friends who are native speakers.

starting a sentence with “I wonder if” usually results in a statement and statements don’t come with question marks. If you want to make it a question, you can say “I wonder: how does one end this sentence?” or “I wonder, should there be a question mark at the end of this sentence?”

I am surprised you consider the second example acceptable. It seems to me to be no more acceptable than the “error” example. Would you put a question mark at the end of this: “Should there be a question mark at the end of this sentence, I wonder” ?

Bad move, English language.

Anyway, salient, as regards the question form “This is X?”, it clearly plays a different role from the corresponding question “Is this X?” at least in some circumstances. (I do agree with you that there are some circumstances in which the former structure might cause confusion, but I claim that it is sometimes not just non-confusing but in fact essential.) If someone serves me a meal that I’m not sure of, I might ask “Is this vegetarian?” However, if I know that they understand that I want vegetarian food, and they’ve given me something that looks and feels somewhat meaty, I might ask “This is vegetarian?” The distinction seems to be that in the latter case I know that the answer is supposed to be “yes”, and I’m just asking for confirmation, and conveying my incredulity, while in the former case I’m actually asking a question where I don’t think I have a good idea about the answer.

I don’t claim that this distinction tracks all the differences between the contexts where one uses one question syntax and the contexts in which one uses the other, but it at least tracks some of them. But complaining about the existence of two different possible structures for a yes/no question in English seems akin to complaining about the two structures of “I went to the store” and “I did go to the store” – in some sense they’re both constructions for the simple past tense, so it’s redundant for the language to allow both, but there are also many cases where one is clearly better than the other (and some cases where both would probably be acceptable).

No. I don’t know who you are. All I know is that you posted this paragraph to me, rather out of the blue:

Also, salient, this isn’t a matter of pre- vs description. I’m as much a prescriptivist as anyone; it’s just that I view my prescriptions as helping communication. I view a sentence like “To whom shall I address this?” as unacceptable in most contexts, because it conveys more information than it should (the social status of the speaker, excessively, and perhaps their opinion of the audience, rudely) and because it hinders communication by requiring people to use structures that effectively aren’t a part of the language. It would also reduce the number of these metadiscussions if everyone just used “Who’ll/Who will/Who should I address this to?”, and these discussions don’t really help the question of addressing letters, so they’re awfully inefficient.

I didn’t know (and still don’t know) how to respond to it. In particular, I’m not sure why this paragraph was addressed to me. I thought your point in that paragraph completely agreed with my comment #23. What did I say, in comments 1 through 44, that you’re disagreeing with and correcting? That’s been (admittedly) nagging at me all day.

Anyhow, we’re talking past each other. I suspect this is, in part, because I’m implicitly approaching this from an education-theory perspective: what should we teach, what grammar should we prioritize or advocate when teaching, and why? …whereas I think you’re explicitly approaching this from an everyday-interaction perspective: what should we get or not get actively peeved about when we encounter it in casual experiences?

Obviously, I’m not answering the second question. I think you’re not answering the first question. Therefore, confusion on both sides. :)

To sum up: I think talking about what ought to be true about perscriptive grammar is inherently talking about education: what grammatical structures and rules do we advocate, as teachers (or as people who comment on what ought to be taught).

I don’t have anything further to contribute. Have a good weekend.