(painful ear aside!)
Over the years, I've noticed the reasons people give for the unacceptability of certain words, usages, meanings, etc. Grammatical, logical, semantic, and syntactic infelicities are the usual suspects, but to mind the only one I give pause to is aesthetic considerations in matters of usage. Take the oblique case of the pronoun who, whom. Its demise was mentioned by no less an English usage authority than HW Fowler back towards the beginning of the late, great, previous century, but people are still arguing about it and corrected one another, sometimes erroneously, here almost a hundred years later. I am personally not much bothered by folks saying who did he marry, while still managing to use the oblique form of who in written and spoken English. Though I have been a writer for a couple of decades now, I stop short of correcting people, except in a professional capacity as an editor (a job I do not relish and seldom do). I find that to do so in public just leads to ill feelings all around and that it is dangerous in private communication.
