Should We Correct People For Grammar Misusage Or Allow Words To Adapt?

"Your going to the party to right?"

"R u ready yet?"

If you are (see this is one way to avoid the your/you're problems) like me, those sentences probably made you cringe as you noticed the glaring grammatical error. The more I text and meet people, the more I see grammatical errors, some of worse and some of less magnitude.

I also see a great deal of redefining words and slang. Right now I'm having a problem grasping how the phrase "hot minute" means a long time. Isn't a minute generally a short amount of time? Wouldn't you associate hot with fast, speedy? But as I'm being increasingly told, it's supposedly a really long time.

As an English major, and someone who likes to stick to traditional meanings of words and grammatical rules, I really don't like agreeing with this usage. I'm quick to correct and slow to adapt.

And yet, I wonder, is it good to stick to the rules, the standards, grammar as the equalizer in language? Maybe this is too quick on my part. In not accepting the change in language, is that stepping in the way of progress?

Our language of English stems from Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots, which are cognates from the Indo-European ancestor language. Looking at the words such as mother, you can see how in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Irish, Lithuanian, and Russian, there is an obvious similarity (matar-, meter, mater, modor, mathir, mote, mat'). However, you can also see that language changes and evolves. It is not a stagnant standard of our world.

I can't help but remember a story about Max Perkins, one of the famous Scribner and Sons editors from the 20s. He was a young editor at that time and a manuscript was being passed around the office. So many older editors rejected it because it didn't fit into their idea of a classic literature like Henry James or Edith Wharton. However, Perkins kept pushing for it, even after it went through many rewrites. In the end, it became "This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a modern classic writing by many standards.

If he didn't push for a more progressive, groundbreaking novel, we wouldn't have the Fitzgerald classics and the mouthpiece of the Jazz Age like we do now. So as much as I hate the changing grammar rules and word usage, giving into riff raff slang, sometimes it might be necessary to discover something great.