Snacks of Doom - Grammar

[Amy Z]

Naama said re: eating raw cookie dough:

 And I would bet my last pair of socks that it's a purely 
> American perversion. I'm sure no Israeli, at least, would even think 
> of that (Yael - can you support me on this? And what about you Brits 
> and other nationalities?).

It starts in childhood, when you make cookies with mom or dad and eat 
the dough off your fingers.  Do Israelis not make chocolate chip 
cookies?  Or do they actually wash their hands to get the dough off?  
(How bizarre!)  Mmm...I ate a Cookie Dough ice cream bar on my way to 
work this p.m.  Vanilla ice cream with chunks of cookie dough, coated 
in chocolate.


Its/it's--I think the reason people make this mistake is that they 
have it in their heads that possessives-->apostrophes.  But then 
there's another error that drives me nuts, which is putting 
apostrophe's into plural's, like that.

It's easy to test for whether to use "that" or "which," too, but in 
common usage they're often used in one another's place, so that people 
learn a very mixed-up version.  Which brings us to the question of 
what grammar is really all about.  (That was a sentence fragment, used 
deliberately for rhythm and emphasis.)  IMO, and I'm going up against 
a long family history of pedantry on this one, grammar should reflect 
usage.  It is just plain silly to say that something is wrong because 
a book says so, when common usage has made it right.  Our language is 
full of now-correct usages that made a previous generation tear its 
hair out.  Somewhere along the line, incorrect becomes correct.  Just 
my two knuts.

When you read a history of grammar (yes, I've actually done something 
that stultifying--it was for a class--and it proved to be pretty 
interesting!) you come across many examples.  The English laughed like 
crazy at the Americans' ridiculous word "reliable."  How many people 
wince nowadays at "reliable"?--though when you think about it, it 
really doesn't make sense.  I also love split infinitives.  I think 
the meaning is almost always clearer and the flow better when an 
infinitive is split.  The logic behind not splitting them isn't 
logical at all; it stems from a period when people were trying to make 
English grammar hew to Latin, and in Latin, as in French etc., an 
infinitive is a single word.

Amy Z
who despite these principles, is incapable of using "hopefully" as 
common use dictates, due to Grammarian Mom's voice in her head