Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Grammar rules you can stop sticking to" video.

@adamcetinkent See, your problem there is your willingness or not to accept a thing which exists. It is an informal register of a specific dialect. Now, it may not be apropriate or sensible to use a given register and/or dialect in a given context (and those who insist that we should not teach children how to speak a standard dialect and formal register As Well As their local dialect, the informal register they use with their ingroups, and whatever technical dialect they end up picking up from their education and employment, are best ignored (for want of willingness to put in the effort of writing multiple extra paragraphs on the matter), but that's an entirely different matter from rejecting them as valid in the correct context. The issue isn't that people can, and do, use slang or various dialects among the appropriate ingroup. It's the people who are incapable of speaking in more standard and formal registers than needed (and those who would suppress attempts to impart this skill to them) as it makes it much more difficult for them to communicate with others, and thus to actually represent their interests when those Outside their ingroup get involved. (which is to say, refusing to actually teach proper standard dialect and formal register can be just as effective a tool at suppressing a group as actually supressing their langauge/dialect/whatever. Arguably more effective if you're willing to play the long game.)
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English does, in fact, have rules, at least as much as any language does. Unfortunately, we Also have many decades, possibly even centuries, of tradition of teaching utter nonsense instead of the actual rules of the actual language. A few decades back people who actually knew what they were talking about realised this and, having gathered enough evidence to prove it, convinced the educational systems in much of the English speaking world to basically toss the lot, keeping only a very few provable useful basics while they spent several more decades nailing down the Actual rules and, with much more difficulty, the best way to go about teaching them. From what I hear, many American schools kept right on teaching what amounted to half remembered fragments of style guides which weren't great at their intended role (One of the most popular of which is infamous for violating its own rules in the text describing them, or in text used as an example of how to correctly follow a different rule) of allowing one to pretend that one could pass for a member of the upper classes when they were published many decades before, nevermind teach children basic langauge skills in the class room. I'm not sure on the current state of the project to create an actually Useful ciriculum teaching English as it actually works, though to my understanding there has been progress made. I have a book from the time when such things came with a second copy of the same work on CD (to facilitate the use of a search engine and other useful tools) that's almost a thousand pages long that is an actual structured and accurate reference guide to, well, basically English Grammar, based on how people actually speak (at least when speaking the more standard dialects).
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@mahamatmahamatabdoulaye893 The actual rules do have logic and are explainable. They're also over a thousand pages long if you stick to just the most common standard dialects. The problem is that what a lot of people were taught in school had no relation to said rules, but were instead a collection of fragments of old (not very good) style guides and declarations by rich and powerful twits from centuries past who had no idea what they were talking about when it came to English but were absolutely convinced that everything that made it Not Latin was somehow a flaw (well, at least if it showed up in some other dialect but not the one they grew up speaking).
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And it's a terrible style that makes an absolute hash out of whatever meaning you might be trying to impart, because that's just not how English works anyway. Mind you, English 'prepositions' are more 'adpositions', falling into the preposition or postposition slot as necessary for whatever you might be doing at the time. You actually Can't end a sentence with an actual preposition unless you horribly mangle it (or get interupted).
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@JohnSmith-tk3pw the issue is that English mostly doesn't actually have prepositions so much as it has adpositions, which can fall into a prepostional or postpositional slot depending on what you're doing with the sentence. Trying to avoid this just results in awkward and unnatural (sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, and that has been the case since before this 'rule' was introduced (one of many instances of someone who had been taught Latin in school but had made no study of how English actually works making a big stink about nothing). Because of how that works out, it's very difficult to actually 'end a sentence in a preposition', though not impossible if you mangle a sentence badly enough. Though if you manage that its meaning is also going to be unintelligable nonsense. They're called prepositions entirely because that's what the equivalent part of Latin was called, and when the term was introduced centuries ago no further effort was put into the matter until far more recent decades, and in between times a collection of rich and powerful individuals with a Latin fetish and no Linguistic training made things up as an excuse to deride people they didn't like for not speaking 'properly'.
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The problem with double negatives isn't using them, it's usuing them improperly, causing confusion as to your meaning. There are certain combinations of double negative that don't actually fully cancel, instead resulting in a weaker meaning. There are certain combinations of dobule negative that go the other way and compound, emphasising instead (though this is largely dialect specific). And there are combinations of double negatives that either fully cancel, leaving the reader confused why you bothered, or introduce confusion and ambiguity as to what you did and did not actually intend to negate.
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less vs fewer isn't a problem in and of itself, but it has contributed to the lack of undertanding which has knock on effects, such as not understanding the phrase 'few and far between' (often said as 'far and few between' from lack of understanding), and the use of 'one of the only' when the intent is 'one of the few'. 'Only' meaning, essentially, that there is only one that falls into that catagory. 'One from among the one' rather than 'One from among the small number'. ... it's kind of an issue.
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