By ninth grade I'd made it to the classes where they don't bother teaching you grammar anymore because it's just pedantic and only serves to allow snarky teenagers to call into question why you're diagramming sentences while also being forced to write essays about ee cummings and Tom Wolfe. My friends, however, were not so lucky and were still busily spending 90% of their class time picking through multiple-choice lists of adverbs.

I commented that grammar in general was a waste of time as English dominated trade and governance in no small part because it is largely a loan language whose strength is the incorporation of new vocabulary and sentence structure and that the reason Castilian Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Northern New Mexican Spanish were borderline incompatible was that only Castilian Spanish has a language academy forever holding Spanish, a fundamentally easier and less stupid language, from evolving into something everyone would speak by choice. I believe I compared the study of grammar to reanimating a corpse.

Mind you, I was sixteen.

Apparently this argument so convinced my friends that they decided to take it to their teacher. They did not present it well. They argued, as I understand it, that the study of grammar causes language innovation to "decompose" and thus, if the teacher really wanted them to learn English, they should be allowed to use whatever grammar they wanted. In response, the teacher referred to grammar as "decomposing" for the next two years in my honor.

I have a great deal more geopolitical insight now than I did then. Nonetheless, I maintain that the lower registers of English are as ad-hoc as they are because codifying rules for conversational English is like building a fence on a mudslide, and it is this lack of footing that makes English more inviting to non-native speakers than it would be with a rigid structure. "scare quotes" are effectively "emphasis" for large swaths of the population. You Can Communicate Timing... in many ways. I can type thru instead of through and my spellchecker gives no fucks. "It be" is now acceptable vernacular for "it is".

Note that this does not apply to higher registers of English, which are still abusively codified. But then, that's the purpose of Jargon - it preserves elitism and expertise. As for me? My linguistic skill comes purely from parroting. I can read "hyphenate and adverb with an adjective" and have no idea what that even means out of context. Subconsciously I know that "half-full glass" is improper grammar even though we all know exactly what it means; consciously I know that "half-full glass" is perfectly acceptable in my daily speech but if I were speaking formally or to people I'm not familiar with I would say "half-filled glass" but that's entirely about social signalling and not at all about accuracy.