the website i used had over forty examples of grammatical errors. here are the ones i chose.

1. "first come, first serve." this sentence sounds right when i say it, but the website says that the word is actually supposed to be "served" and not "serve." the lack of the d making it past tense makes the sentence "lose its meaning." this is obviously just verbs losing their endings, which is a sign of language change.

2. using "me" to start a sentence. grammatically, the website says, we are supposed to list ourselves second and the other noun first. the author of this website obviously has very strict views on subject pronouns and object pronouns (blech). i think this is language becoming less formal. i think (in my world at least) language is much less written and much more frequently spoken. starting a sentence with me just makes sense to me verbally.

3. overuse of apostrophes. the website states that the only times we are to use apostrophes are when there are missing letters or we are showing possession. in this case, "the johnson's" would be wrong, because it is neither showing possession nor is it making up for missing letters. however, again, i believe it just makes sense to a lot of us to add an apostrophe.

my website didnt talk about this, but it felt wrong to not include the idea of subject-verb agreement a great many people i know feel much more comfortable being referred to as "they," but they should not lose their personage just because they do not want to use he/she pronouns. gendered pronouns are truly a thing of the past and "they" is just as singular as he or she.