I know I'm going to regret this, but here I go anyway (with apologies to the
rest of the list for feeding the trolls):

Errors like those committed by your goddaughter are obvious to all native
English speakers. No one here would say they are correct and your parody of "an
English teacher" is a straw-man argument. Plenty of us, however, would say that
our time is better spent working on other issues of communication rather than
worrying about every single error. Do you interrupt your conversation with your
goddaughter to correct every mistake she makes? Or are you more focused on the
content of the conversation?

But this sort of error has nothing in common with your fixation.

What you claim are errors with the perfect are NOT seen as errors by native
speakers (apart from yourself), including many highly educated people with vast
knowledge of what is and is not acceptable in Standard English. They are not
seen as errors by usage books.

Moreover, what you claim is correct usage is in fact condemned as a vulgar error
by many usage books of an older generation.

I find it ironic that the grammarians who are closest in attitude towards your
view of language would be precisely the ones most likely to condemn your usage
for being semi-literate.

In short, you can mock descriptivists all you want. The fact that you do it
poorly, and with little understanding of the real issues involved makes you look
silly, but even if you managed it better it wouldn't buttress your case in the
slightest, because even by the strictest of old-fashioned prescriptive
standards, the "error" you worry about exists only in your own mind.

Brad Johnston wrote:
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have a French God-daughter who lives, not surprisingly, in France and who will say to me, 'I explain you', when she means, 'I will explain it to you' or 'let me explain it to you'.
>  
> In her native tongue, the words are 'je vous l'expliquerai', literally, 'I you it will explain'. She knows enough about English to know that she should reverse the order of 'you' and 'explain'. And she knows that in French the L-apostrophe before 'expliquer' is correct but is normally omitted in speaking. She puts that all together and says, in English, 'I explain you'.
>  
> When she says it to me, I know exactly what she means. There is no question in my mind what she means. But the way she says it is not what we should teach, nor is it what we do teach, in our schools.
>  
> The argument that anything is correct if it does not create misunderstanding is preposterous. There is an English teacher on the ATEG list who continually tries to make this ridiculous argument.
>  
> Heck, it don't matter to me none.
>  
> Do you know what I mean when I say that? Of course you do.
>  
> Do we teach it that way in our schools? Of course we don't.
>  
> .brad.01july09.
> 
> 
> 
>       
> 
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