I had a conversation yesterday about grammar. The indirect question was to what degree proper English was necessary and demonstrative of intelligence. For a writer-type, I somewhat surprisingly come down on the side of laxivity. As far as I'm concerned, if the idea is coming across, then the rest is just specifics. She, on the other hand, felt otherwise.

The specific object of our disagreement was y'all (plural) and ya'll (singular). I only use the former, though I don't get particularly annoyed when I head the latter. I actually only rarely hear ya'll in the singular and wasn't even aware of its existence until relatively recently.

Of course, there are those in the north that argue that neither is a word, but until they can come up with a contraction for "you all" I figure we're in the clear.

In the case of "ya'll" (or "You will" or, in the sense it's its used "you should" or sometimes just plain "you") it's a regional dialect that she feels gives credence to those that feel that the people from the south are lacking in intelligence.

Maybe so. It's an interested question in regards to language integrity. Perhaps people will never all use perfectly correct grammar and vocabulary as defined by the Oxford dictionary - in fact, I think the world would be a more boring place is everyone did - but there is a case to be made that there ought to at least be a standard with which every dialect is drawn from and dialects that deviate from that ought to be considered abnormal so different spices of the same language remain the same language.

Theo Dalrymple bemoans the dumbing down of English in Britain:

I have noticed the same phenomenon on various wireless stations as well. It is clear that certain announcers have been told to use the short ‘a’, the long ‘a’ having unacceptable connotations of social superiority. Moreover, in railway stations that have no compunction about using as announcers incomprehensible Nigerians and Punjabis for whom English is their seventh language, the announcements giving the good news that the stations are no-smoking areas and that something nasty will happen to those who infringe this regulation is always given in what one might call exaggerated standard pronunciation, just as in Hollywood films the cultivated English voice always stands for unspeakable evil. Thus our population is being subtly indoctrinated with the idea that received pronunciation means prohibition and restriction. The glottal stop means liberty.

It seems to me unlikely, however, that the changes that have come about are the result of any welling up of an insistent or irresistible demand from below. Even the bolshiest Briton is so idle that he will not protest at received pronunciation, however much he might hate it. No: this is yet another sign of that peculiar combination of self-hatred and pusillanimity that characterises what Marxists used to call the ruling class.

It's an interesting hypothesis and one that I don't actually doubt, to a degree.

A long time ago I made the acquaintance from Pasadena. I found out later that he didn't like me very much at first because he felt I was a little stuck up. Why? Because of my word usage. That is to say that that I spoke English above the Pasadena standard (it ought to be noted that my friend's grasp of the language is strong and that is not the issue) and he felt that I was a bit stuck up. Because of my control of the language.

He's not the first and he probably won't be the last. As I've gotten older, my English has actually gotten a little bit worse, in a way, because I've made efforts to start using more simplistic language (in person, at least, you won't see much simplicity on here) in large part to avoid turning off my fellow Texans that don't place a particularly high value on fancy-talk and intellectualism.

The alternate course of action is to declare it "their problem" and keep speaking as I so choose (with precise wording and generally correct structure). On the other hand, language is, to me, about communication. If what I'm saying is colored negatively by the words I choose - even if those words are wholly inoffensive in their intent and, indeed, their actual meaning - then I am failing to communicate. If I exhibit an accent in order to make someone more comfortable talking to me (which I frequently do when meeting someone knew that is obviously of limited education - at the old truckstop for example), then I don't percieve anything particularly wrong with that.

It's the Marxist in me, I guess!