Unlike Bronwen Clunes, I’m With Mr Jackson On This One:

Conjugating verbs is a subject close to Samuel L Jackson’s heart.

"On Twitter someone will write, ‘Your an idiot,’ and I’ll go, ‘No, you’re an idiot,’ and all my Twitterphiles will go, ‘Hey, Sam Jackson, he’s the grammar police,’ " he proudly proclaimed in an interview this week. "I’ll take that", he continued, "I mean, we have newscasters who don’t even know how to conjugate verbs, something Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow never had problems with."

The more I see it happening, the less comfortable I’m becoming with the underlying mindset that seems to be driving it. At its essence it is old-fashioned classism and elitism, and it can be unapologetically so.

Knowing how to communicate properly in your own language is now 'elitist'?

It hits a raw nerve for me, having grown up in a country where classism and silencing through denied education was not just a dirty bourgeois secret, but something that was enshrined in law. The South African government under apartheid made no apologies for a system that handed out better education to “whites” . Education was segregated by means of the 1953 Bantu Education Act, which created a separate system of education for African students, one which was designed to prepare them as a labouring class – a system which existed until apartheid’s dismantling in 1994.

Yes, maybe, but that has zero to do with why some of our largest institutions seem incapable of getting the basics right...

Some people would argue that some of us have had access to education, and are simply being grammatically lazy. And further, as a friend and lover of grammar pointed out, “when you muddy the waters needlessly, you poison the well of our shared linguistic patrimony.” Yes, words have meanings, shared meanings, and different words have different nuances. To run roughshod over the history of language by using a word without knowing what it means, or in willful ignorance of what it means, is worthy of critique in a university assignment when it’s a matter of sloppiness or indifference. But we can’t transpose those same expectations to public debate because in doing so, we risk excluding those who have a right (and need!) to be heard.

Frankly, if they are that illiterate, I don't really want to hear from them...

Grammar has always been freer than its function. It is not static, despite having been girdled at first opportunity by Victorian snobbery. To understand it differently will not only lead to people feeling excluded by language, but by society too.

Boo hoo!