Science and language or two entirely different subjects. Science must be universal, with similar measurements and classifications. It's why genus species names are in Latin. It's why we have the metric system.

Ever heard of pidgin languages or creoles? Dialects? Language changes over time. As a result from mispronunciation, changing spelling, different regions meaning different things. You can't have universal form of a language.

In English there are UK and American variants, and I quite frankly do not like your attitude to people who "should" be speaking like "English Nazis" -- as you have dubbed yourself. You're no English Nazi. You just like ranting on something you think you're good at.

An Italian chef may like pizza better, an American chef may like hamburger better, but it doesn't take a chef to say that wood isn't food. This is the same situation. No, I have no authority in English language whatsoever, but it doesn't take a certified linguist to point out you're using your "your" wrong

It's "Has this world gone mad", not "Have this world gone mad"

..so we'll call you a grammar nazi sympathizer then

Ahs dun't speak 'r writes English... Ah dun speaks in Andyisms.

so y'all best deal with it

I do not know that English, dubbed as "international language", should not have some kind of agreed standards, so that when someone said "bomb", everyone knows it's an explosive substance. I suppose I set my personal standards wrong, because even though I have explicitly stated who and what I am, someone decided to point it out again - to me - who have declared the exact same things before. Maybe I typed it in the wrong dialect? :/

I had hoped of some kind of discussion, not a personal attack

That would be ideal, but when a language spans as much surface area as English, it's bound to develop dialects. I'm sure whatever your native language is, there are plenty of dialects. My history teacher spoke about his time in Germany, and how he lived in a town overshadowed by a mountain. One day, he drove around the mountain, where there was another town, and in that town they had a different dialect of German. The difference in pronunciation depends on the person, my parents are from the midwest so they would tease me if I sounded too much like a "Rhode Islander", saying "you're" like "your" was one of those Rhode Islander things. It also depends on context, such as "so you're going to the movies?" is often pronounced exactly like "so your going to the movies?" but "you're at the movies?" has the "you're" pronounced differently. Many of the people you see in movies sound like Midwesterners, by the way, similar to how in old movies they had a Pacific Northwest accent. Maybe one day it'll be Bostonas, all dose celebrities in their fancy cahs.

I simply wanted to point out that you saying you're a non-native English Nazi sounds so pretentious.

Do you know the difference between affect and effect? How and when to use me, myself, and I? Whether or not to put a comma after or before "and"? How to use a semicolon? Did you know that contractions are not proper English?

There are many things hiding in English language, and knowing the difference between "your" and "you're" doesn't make you an "English Nazi".

EDIT: Oh, and as for your comment about English being an international language, it's not. You're thinking of lingua franca, which is a failed attempt at what you think English should be.

They burned books they considered to be of degenerate or leftist influence. I doubt they considered proper grammar to be a threat to them. And Mosley was an MP at one point, so I'm sure he was aware for the need for correct spelling in his letter writing, especially as one lord sent him a list of the correct modes of address for various classes of person.

Mussolini's policies on the other hand did tend towards physical education over written learning.

Good post, yet, as much as I detest agreeing with the OP, writing a language does require a certain degree of uniformity.

While i was a kid, most of the older members of my family spoke in accented English. Sometime I still things like "im" and "du" when i mean "in" and "you".

I had classes in Belgium, the UK and the US. As a late teen, I developed more of a basic Midwestern accent, but I tend to mispronounce certain vowels. In my writing, I still, on occasion, tend to drop "the"s and sometimes insert extra "U"s in the British style.

The real point of language, however, is to effectively communicate. Being overly critical of details does little but interfere with communication.

And failing to pay them enough attention makes communication vague and ambiguous.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people write "I can do it" where they meant "can't" but somehow failed to write the rest of the word.

Obviously it's a matter of degree.

No, it doesn't. Mostly because a vast majority of linguists are far more interested in descriptive features of a language, and not playing a prescriptivist grammar nazi(I refuse to capitalize that word); and are far more interested in things like why such distinctions came about, how non-natives pick up such distinctions, why they seem to be difficult for even natives to grasp, and so on.

Such errors may be incorrect, but they usually don't affect communication; which is the key issue. This isn't like people calling wood food, but more like someone ordering Orange Chicken at a restaurant, finding that it's not exactly the same as at Panda Express, and screaming that everything should be exactly the same.

Also, OP should be careful about presenting themself as having some special knowledge of English or an ability to judge things ungrammatical. You are a non-native speaker, and that does mean that your knowledge of the language is influenced by how you were taught it, and your native language. What you consider ungrammatical or 'wrong' native speakers may consider perfectly acceptable, either in general terms("yes, it's technically ungrammatical, but it sounds fine to me") or simply as part of their dialect("well, that's how we say it"). Or vice versa; it may sound wrong to a native's ear, but not to yours. As an example, consider this: my partner is a native Russian speaker, though he speaks English nearly perfectly and 'passes' as a native, and he decided to take a linguistics course with me. One exercise dealt with phonotactic constraints, and for fun we were asked to decide whether non-English words might be adopted into English without studying the actual phonotactics of it(i.e. intuitively). For me, and most other natives in the class, this was a simple task; for him, he continually 'approved' words which fit Russian phonotactic constraints but not necessarily English ones(iirc, one example was words that start with 'vl,' e.g. Vladik).

tl;dr Not everyone speaks the same English; and NO ONE speaks 'grammatically correct' English. So...yeah, grammar nazis and other avowed prescriptivists are basically tilting at windmills here.

At many American universities, the introductory course on a subject is labelled 101. So English 101 is the introductory course on the English language, Physics 101 is the introductory course on physics, and so on, and so forth...

Grammar. It's the difference between knowing your [censored], and knowing you're [censored].

I think it's from the phrase "one on one". When you are introduced to something, you are often taught by someone personally, or one on one. So, Science 101 would be like a one on one introduction to Science, even though it might not really be one on one. That's what I think, at least.

Yep, usually 100 or 1000 level classes are for first year/freshman, then the 01 designates that it's the first class, usually in the first semester. And yeah. No 'one on one' involved, since many 101 classes are weed out courses and have more students than higher level courses. In year two, you'd have 201, 202, 212 etc., with an extra zero or one in between depending on your course codes.

Oh, I see. Nothing to do with Orwell's Room 101, then...

Depends. After having dreamt of architecture being one thing my whole life, ARCH 101 surely felt otherwise.

Well, depending on your views on the university system......

The primary function of language is to communicate, if you can understand what someone is saying it is serving its purpose, apostrephes aside. In my opinion, apostrephes are redundant anyway seeing as context says whether your or you're is intended, pointing out someone has used the wrong one is just being a [censored] (unless your an editor for a proffesional magazine or the like).

A secondary but more enjoyable function of language is to obfuscate.

That's true of any and every field of knowledge. Everyone loves knowing more than people, almost as much as they love demonstrating that.

*shrug* All this doesn't bother me. We're on forums, where people are supposed to be relaxed when writing, not going "omg is that 'I could', or 'I couldn't care less' ??? Someone's going to bite my head off over this !!!". And as forums go, this one isn't eyeball-searing. Personally, I start caring when the punctuation and the capitalization disappear, because it makes it so much harder to understand what's said.

I am way more bothered to see spelling/grammar mistakes popping up more and more often in newspapers - well, their online version to be honest. What's their excuse ?

I'm not a huge fan of grammar nazi things. Mainly because I think that it comes of as rather pretentious.

As far as my usage of English goes, I feel comfortable enough in my writing that I don't really bother that much with 'rules'. The goal of language is to promote communication, not to promote the use of grammar. Now, that doesn't mean that I toss grammar out the window, when communicating, it is important to keep your audience from continuously stopping to think, "That doesn't sound right". There are words and grammatical conventions that I refuse to use. Things like "whom". It is a worthless word that should be eliminated from the English language. I also hate hyphens. They can crawl into a ditch and die. I am not a proponent of semicolons. My stance on them has softened lately, and I will use them now, but I generally try to arrange my sentence structure to eliminate them.

There are also things I love using. For example, I love commas more than is healthy, and ellipses get used a lot.

I will admit that my usage of "your" and "you're" isn't always correct (Sorry, I don't proof read everything I write), and the "there", "they're", and "their" trip me up as well. I know the difference in my head, I just don't think about that when I type, I think about the major points that I want to communicate.

The worst is that they're out to get you. I never ever used to do those mistakes, but recently - I suppose it's from reading and reading it over and over - I've had to edit myself.