Do you lot honestly accept the unintentional abuse and misuse of words without batting an eyelid? just smile magnanimously, saying to yourself: "I know what he means"? doesn't that take us all onto the slippery slope of Humpty-dumptyism?
Of course not, only the prescriptivist-damned, wild-eyed, anarchist, straw man descriptivist does that. But at the grammar maven end of the P to D spectrum, one finds all kinds of silly admonitions and ukases against many perfectly normal usages: e.g., split infinitives, preposition-ended sentences, which-that in non-restrictive-restrictive clauses, to decimate meaning to destroy. Most descriptive linguists whom I known are perfectly comfortable using Standard English and in correcting solecisms in student papers. They also don't come completely unhinged if somebody uses a perfectly grammatical ain't in informal varieties of the mother tongue, as many on the other side of the aisle do.
My real argument with the P-camp is how often they are just plain wrong in their explanations of how or why some usage or bit of grammar has come about. They use faulty logic, flights of fancy, or mistaken history to shore up their arbitrary condemnations of somebody's language. In these cases, I find myself shaking my head in disbelief: can somebody who alleges to cherish language so much but so clueless about it at such a fundamental level. One reason given, over and over again, is that "bad grammar" reduces the possibility of communication, but the thing being corrected is usually not only rather common, but oftentimes perfectly grammatically correct, and there is slight to no chance of ambiguity or misunderstanding.
