The thing is, the writers weren't taught during various sea-changes in education that turned out to be disasters.
And that, I suspect, is one of those things that will force a language change. I hate it too, and it's just as distracting to me on the page, but anymore, it seems like the majority of people just don't care. Not the old "not caring too much but still feeling guilty," but truly do not see why people are so uptight about (to them) unknown and pointless codes of language.
Probably. And it's annoying, too. I'm one of those who was never taught grammar -- I learned about nouns, verbs, etc, but not how they fit together in a sentence. Instead, I read a lot and just picked things up. Some things "felt right" while others did not, but I couldn't explain why. Learning Spanish, which has a closer grammar structure to English than Hebrew does (which might not count anyway since I started learning it in kindergarten and so picked up a bunch of things instinctively there too) helped me to recognize the bits of English grammar I'd always known about, but hadn't completely recognized.
Realizing, though, that I picked up correct grammar from reading, it's scary to see that published books have an increasing amount of grammar problems -- that means other kids who pick up grammar through writing would pick it up wrong.
My grammar improved vastly from studying foreign languages as well. German helped, but it was Latin that really did the trick. Funny how other languages can be helpful. :) What used to throw people for a loop (and still does, sometimes) was when I would describe something in English grammar using terms from another language, and I'd get a thoughtful "well, I could see how you might describe [thing] that way..."
And that, I suspect, is one of those things that will force a language change. I hate it too, and it's just as distracting to me on the page, but anymore, it seems like the majority of people just don't care. Not the old "not caring too much but still feeling guilty," but truly do not see why people are so uptight about (to them) unknown and pointless codes of language.
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Realizing, though, that I picked up correct grammar from reading, it's scary to see that published books have an increasing amount of grammar problems -- that means other kids who pick up grammar through writing would pick it up wrong.
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