Relative pronouns - that and who

Yup, why start now, eh, Frank?

All the rest was nothing but red herrings.

This is the egregious part, Frank. You've likely pulled this crap on others and without any apparent knowledge of the subject.

Miklos wrote: You might consider the fact that the study of grammar has little hard science behind it.

The development of the information age and of English as a world language means that such lapses have even greater negative import than formerly. But what is available on the shelves has fallen into sufficient discredit for grammar to have forfeited its place in the curriculum, unrespected and little heeded by the brighter students.

Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory

Geoffrey K. Pullum

University of California, Santa Cruz

...

Grammar and style Grammar "

the principles constituting the syntactically and morphologically permissible expressions of a language " is not at all the same thing as style. Style involves skill. It involves making choicesbetween alternatives that the grammar makes available. Those choices can make the difference betweenusing the language brilliantly or using it ploddingly. This is the sort of domain in which the notion of regulative rules makes sense. Indeed, what are known as ‘house style’ guides issued by publishers of books, journals, and newspapers may lay down rules that are in effect mandatory (there can be job-related consequences if the rules are not followed).

But other sources (language teachers; writing tutors; books on how to write) offer discretionary advice. When a style guide or writing tutor tells you that adjuncts are not placed between to and the head verb of an infinitival clause, the claim is not that this never happens in Standard English prose. Far from it: the matter would not be worth mentioning unless people often placed adjuncts in that position! Rather, the claim is that you are doing wrong if you position adjuncts thus: you are doing something that you shouldn’t.

This is what is meant by a prescriptive rule. Construed as having descriptive intent, prescriptive rules seem hopelessly silly, easily refuted hypotheses about the correctness conditions. They seem lessworthy of being taken seriously than the absurdly obvious warnings printed on the packaging of nearly every kind of tool or other consumer durable you can buy in America.

I swear I purchased a folding windshield-sized cardboard screen for protecting the inside of my car from getting overheated in the hot California summer sun, and on the back were the words “Do not drive with screen in place.”But at least that is advice that everyone seems to follow (I certainly do), and a good thing too.

Prescriptive rules seem even dopier than that, because they warn against doing things which (a) everybody does all the time, and (b) are not harmful or inadvisable anyway. But of course prescriptive rules are not intended to be constitutive. They are intended to be regulative.English is assumed to be already defined in some other way, or not to need any definition. The prescriptivist’s rules are deliberately making recommendations about the ways in which you are recommended to use it or not to use it.

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:1hPgf7kYd9QJ:people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf+Ideology,+power+and+linguistic+theory&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1

My guess is that for a person to develop his/her natural voice, and thereby become an effective speaker and writer, he must use a language until it is engaged by the syntactic areas of his brain.

If one obeys a great deal of prescriptive grammar, he is going to be slowed in learning to think and express himself gracefully in a language. Are we in agreement that deeper grammar (as opposed to prescriptive) is closely connected to syntax--and, therefore, much more accommodating of imaginative arrangement?

Agree with you that few people in ordinary, natural conversation use prescriptive grammar. Sounds weird and stilted