Sorry, this will be brief, and pointless. Courtesy of a post by Sean Carroll, I herewith present the proper way to order your favorite drink:
1. Ask for what you want.
2. Drink it.
You will note that I have excluded everything having to do with learning how anyone else does it, receiving instruction, and most especially long discussions about what effect some method produces. It’s your drink. You’re doing it for yourself. If you’re doing it to show off, then you have some serious psychological issues and should spend the time looking for a decent therapist rather than pretending to be sophisticated by, for fuck’s sake, discussing in what manner you fuck your brain cells over with alcohol. Because, seriously, no matter what the pageantry or ritual or pompous bullshit, that’s what it comes down to. You can’t handle reality and need to alter your perceptions.
I’ll take this opportunity (especially because doing a short post makes me itch) and address every one of the various proscriptions over proper grammar and usage with a simple reminder: language is about communication. It fails, not when some arbitrary rule isn’t followed, but only when someone is confused. It’s true, there are countless conventions that we use through force of habit, but there’s nothing against these changing through common acceptance. If you really care about the proper use of an ‘Oxford Comma,’ or that your sentence follows some ideal structure, you’ve got problems completely unrelated to communication. Do not be surprised when someone asks you how you can be that big an asshole with that tight a sphincter.
But, at least Superbowl is over. Now we only have to get through a few more weeks of discussing Superbowl commercials. You realize that someone invented a stupidity filter for internet connections long ago, but people thought their router had failed…