Because some of us have a personality that demands that things BE the way they ARE, and not they way they aren't. I think I've made it fairly clear here that I don't like gray areas. I want things to be either black or white. Or maybe sometimes one and then the other.How painful it must be for you to merely exist.
I am not against error-free communication, because I make my living trying to write lucidly about technical subjects for a technical audience. But, I know that language is as unruly as a rebelious teenager, always wishing to slip the arbitrary bonds with which folks attempt to constrain it. Lots of online writing is ephemeral and most of us do not take the writers to task for a typo, misspelling, or grammatical blunder, though of course we may cluck our tongues to ourselves when we read it.
What amazes me about English orthography is that so many people are invested emotionally in a system that is at best terrible, unreasonable, and ad hoc. I for one would be happy to drop our system for one that made sense tomorrow, but short of a revolution it ain't gonna happen. As for black and white in matters linguistic: have you ever looked at a dictionary or read a poem? There's nothing black and white about language, period! I am not chastizing you for your personality. I am not saying you are wrong for your crusade. I am just wondering about your state of mind, perhaps because I too share it at times. If I am interviewing somebody for a tech writing / editing position and their resume is full of errors of spelling or grammar, I suggest that we not hire the candidate.
But darn it, if such-and-such happened at 2 p.m., I can't stand it if somebody says it happened at 4. Even if the time has NO relevance to the point of the story, 4:00 is not 2:00! So--there's one reason for you.Unreliable narrators are not always the fault of shoddy authorship, sometimes they are a part of the story. And they have been with us from the beginning of the novel. I'm not saying it's always that way, but sometimes it is. Sometimes our passions get in the way of our enjoying a good story. I once read a critique of an 18th century story that concentrated on the horrid fact that the author didn't know the difference between 's' and 'f', because most of the time these two letters were confused. The critic didn't know about long esses.
