Spelling is ruining the English language

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Kingswood

To make room for hundreds of hours of spelling classes, we must dumb down the teaching of grammar, punctuation and literature.

If you don't care about spelling why care about grammar?
I'll use "very unique" if I damn well please and you ain't gonna convince me you won't know what I'm saying. :p

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

If you don't care about spelling why care about grammar?
I'll use "very unique" if I damn well please and you ain't gonna convince me you won't know what I'm saying. :p

You can use qualifiers with "unique" if you want. I won't stop you. Just don't try it with "pregnant".

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

If you don't care about spelling why care about grammar?

That's fine if your sentence is "me kill tiger" or "me drink gin."

How do you convey the fact that you drank the gin yesterday? Once you're forming tenses, you're doing grammar. You can argue that "I drinked" is logical and conveys the meaning to another English speaker--but you're still dealing with accepted rules of English. You can't unilaterally decide to form the past tense by adding "xx" to the end of each verb--that is, you can't do so and expect other people to understand you. If you can convince everybody you speak with to accept that convention, more power to you. But in that case you've arguably changed the grammar, not discarded the whole concept of grammar.

For that matter, in "me kill tiger," how do you know which is the subject and which is the object? "The subject comes first" may not be the correct answer for every language.

"Grammar" is not just a bunch of musty rules beaten into you by your 4th grade English teacher. It's a common understanding among your group speaking the same language/dialect about how language is structured.