This is a war that has been going on for a few hundred years now, and if you're curious, the current score is something like prescriptivists: 0; descriptivists: 18,433,327. The reason for this is straightforward: There is a massive percentage of the population, somewhere north of 99 percent, that struggles with telling the difference between nouns and verbs. With no use for the rules of grammar, they simply talk like their friends and neighbors talk. That this will lead to slowly drifting definitions and grammatical structures is inevitable, because these people don't know the rules in the first place, and could not fucking care less if they did.

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This puts writers, who are generally concerned with verbin' etiquette, in a tricky position. By choosing not to use newly minted grammatical rules and words, they impede their ability to communicate with the rest of the population. They cut themselves off from the creative options that new words and grammar open up, and if they hew too closely to the old, unchanging rules, they can make their writing sound stuffy and formal.

And now for the furious backpedaling: This isn't to say that we shouldn't care about grammar at all. Even if rules and definitions change, those changes should come slowly. When we violate grammatical rules or use strange new definitions of words, we impede our audience's ability to comprehend what we're saying. We can see vestiges of this when we travel to other English-speaking countries, where small changes in language can lead to these issues of delayed comprehension. Witness the differing meanings when saying the following sentence to English or American audiences:

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"She crammed chips into her fanny until the townspeople begged her to stop."

Even if we can eventually figure out what's going on here, and are appropriately horrified, this type of confusion and delay in comprehension should be avoided whenever possible. That's why grammar is important.

So please, people of the Internet, learn the difference between all your "theres" and your "whichs" and your "yours." Stop using the "7" key when you mean "T." And please, ask a grown-up for help with apostrophes. Too many kids are getting hurt.

And on a final note, for the people who are combing this article for the grammatical errors I no doubt overlooked: I put them there deliberately as a test. Congratulations, you won. To claim your prize, please strike yourself with a chain until you stop feeling; the prize will be delivered to your home shortly thereafter.

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For more Bucholz, check out The 25 Most Nonsensical Protest Signs and 6 Reasons the Comments on This Article Will Be Useless.

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