That's right! Stop using water for people to wash and drink and start giving it to farmers to irrigate vital walnut crops instead.

Follow the logic and tour the inside of your own ass!

But they're still growing water-intensive crops!

But what would be the effect of doing the same on Greece's GDP? Apples to apples.

What, am I supposed to be cowed now because the nasty man said mean things to me on the internet? You must have very little faith in your arguments, given that all you've been doing is trying (and failing) to insult me with some very hackneyed slurs. I mean, I understand -- your arguments, such as they are, have been really shit, so I'm not surprised you don't have faith in them. But genuinely: you'd be better off trying to learn from why your arguments have failed, than waste your time on yet more bluster. But as I intimated at the outset of this little back-and-forth, you do seem to prefer the tug of a good ol' fashioned ad hominem.

It's been twenty years since I was a student.

You don't appear to get very much right, do you?

1. Removing the indefinite article does not improve the syntax of the sentence.
2. I didn't claim it was a grammatical structure. But it's certainly shoddy English.
3. My point being that you made your own sentence virtually unintelligible through your abuse of English, while complaining that other people don't stick to the rules. That makes you appear stupid and hypocritical.

None of these mistakes give you the vivid style of a Heinlein, a Bellow or a Mantel. They are not stylish. They are just mistakes. Pretending otherwise is the equivalent of the kitten hiding his head behind a sofa, unaware that his ass is sticking out the other side (there's an nice vivid metaphor for you, courtesy of the incomparable RAH).

As for your guess as to what I enjoy reading...it's exciting, but indicative of your wish to see the world as you would like it to be, rather than as it actually is. I read fiction and fact with equal gusto. Sometimes the latter can be more expressive than the latter. Who'da thunk it?

I do love the overall premise that your mistakes are lovely special stylistic motifs but other people's mistakes are indications of their idiocy. The ego is a mighty thing to behold. Or as Heinlein also put it (gosh, he was expressive, wasn't he?): Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

No-one seems to have bitten on any specific egregious baity errors, intentional or no -- including you, assertions with no specifics notwithstanding.

But any errors are there because I genuinely don't give a shit. I don't aim for 100% or anything close to it; just good enough to be understood by most readers.

Actually, not even in my case, no matter how morally superior you think you are.

And yes, amazingly, regional accents are and always have been a pretty good proxy for class in the UK. Quite a famous play was once written about this very topic. You could spend some time away from Slashdot watching it. It might do you some good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Specifically, a strong regional accent has until very recently been taken by most British people as a sign that the speaker is not middle class. I grew up in Manchester. The softer your accent, the more posh you were considered. Same was true in Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, the West Country. Compare the Glasgow to Edinburgh accents, for another example.

If you spent a little less time on ad hominems and attacking straw men, you might open up some space to actually learn something about the world. But then, learning's a scary thing.

Who said anything about rules? That's the whole point, it's a question of taste. I'm not the one venerating Strunk & White et al here, I'm the one calling out the hypocrisy of doing so while not sticking to their standards.

However, I can promise you that professional writers will not start a written sentence in this context with "So" in place of "Thus".

On "in the extreme", you've got yourself muddled. As you say, "in the extreme" is a perfectly valid phrase; "to the extreme", which is what the OP used, is not. There is the phrase, "to take X to extremes", but this is not the sense intended by the OP.

I went to Cambridge, so while I will use an Oxford comma, I only do so where it helps avoid ambiguity, which was not the case here.

In any event, did you miss the first part of my sentence? I don't care. But the OP said that they did.

Again, you're missing my point. Talking as though the only thing standing between a bright young guy from the projects and a job at Goldmans is their poor command of standard English is just absurd. They don't value what Goldmans offers. They can't afford to value it, because it's a dangerous distraction from the world they actually have to navigate, which poses rather more immediate and visceral challenges than doing well at interview. It reminds me of the slackjawed incomprehension I saw on the faces of young bright compassionate managers at a big 4 accountancy when they tried to run a program for disadvantaged teens here in the UK, and the teens weren't hugely interested: the managers were deep in Rumsfeldian not-knowing what they didn't know territory. They lacked the insight and lived understanding of what the teens had to go through every day, to see why what was on offer was just not that appealing.

They could have done with watching this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"silly"?
"little"?
"sonny"?

Condescension and ad hominem attacks really, honestly, truly, aren't substitutes for actual argument. They're just ways for you to masturbate without having to bother pulling your pants down.

Controlling language has a long ugly history of being about race and class. Ask the Kurds (but do so in Turkish, or Erdogan will be mighty pissed off). Or ask the presenters with regional accents on the BBC, none of whom would have had a look in only twenty years ago.

You're missing my point. Anyone who's aspiring to a career in, say, banking is pretty likely to make an effort to learn some form of "standard" English. But this is really about trying to control the language spoken by people who could not give two shits about a career in banking, because they are living very different lives in which such an aspiration is not only absurd but potentially dangerously distracting too.

Except that the author is Oliver Kamm, who's as British as they come. His mum translated the Asterix books, for God's sake! And in doing so, created some of the most elegant, witty and precise translations ever achieved, such as the immortal "We've been framed, by Jericho".

Thank you Anthea Bell! And Derek Hockridge, too, of course.

You really do not understand the nature of the OED, if you think it is the definitive source for the language. The OED is a record of known usages of English words. It is decidedly descriptive and not prescriptive.

Sheesh, people! Can we please start seeing the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be??