DickC Loc: NE Washington state

I'm a Single Malt guy, Glen Livitt 20 year best!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

THAT's some really good Scotch!

My wife occasionally travels to Europe on business and brings back interesting Scotches from the duty free shops. They're sometimes different from those imported into the States.

DickC Loc: NE Washington state

I do love it but also like Ezra Brooks 90 proof Bourbon too! Being a cancer survivor and a home bound invalid I can hardly complain! LOL

Dannj

This “me”, “I” issue isn’t new. I hear many people in my “Boomer” generation use the wrong word. I try to talk to my grandchildren about what they’re learning in school and peruse their class materials and I don’t find the same shortcomings you mention. I wonder if it’s a geographical issue. Although I’ll admit that some of the math calculations they’re taught do throw me off😂

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Education is both a business and a political propaganda machine on some levels. It also separates the privileged from the great unwashed.

Just like Microsoft had a fairly mature product in Microsoft Office in the early 2000s, and have "rearranged the deck chairs on the cruise ship" every so often to keep it fresh and justify their existence, the textbook companies have to take a different approach to math every now and then.

Academia is hardly in agreement about everything. There are elements of it who want to protect the status quo, and elements of it who wish to change that. There are grammarians who believe all language properties stopped evolving at some point in the past (inevitably when THEY were in school), and there are others who believe in the evolutionary nature of language.

Do we need cursive writing in an age of computers and smartphones and speech-to-text translation software?

Do we need to continue to cling to the idea that there is a single Standard "English English" and a single Standard "American English," or can we admit that English has evolved locally and regionally with the migration of English-speaking people all over the globe? Can we admit that the brain organizes speech patterns according to the way we first heard the language the way our parents spoke it, and that, for us, that is grammatically correct, even if different from those in another neighborhood, town, state, or country?

There certainly is some value in standardizing language within the academic community, and in standardizing math within the scientific community. But outside those hallowed institutions, do lay people really need to adhere to rigid standards to be understood? As long as the correct point is communicated, or the correct answer to the equation is rendered, does it matter whether one approach or another is used?

Frankly, I don't know. With global conflicts, pandemics, inflation, democracy vs autocracy, rapid climate change, and tribal religious conflicts raging, whether we use pronouns properly or not in search of answers to the world's biggest problems seems silly.