After teaching high school and community college English for 30 years, I'm ruined. I can't read a blessed thing that I don't "grade." I'm also adept at reading "Dumb" and can figure out almost any word or phrase. My masters in Medieval literature really took me far with freshman Basic English. Personally, I'm just an old stump jumper from southern Illinois, and my wife (another English teacher---yes, our kids are really, really screwed up) is a reformed Chicagoan. I was into literature; she was into grammar. I hated her correcting my grammar all the time and decided that the only way to shut her up was to get better at it than she. It worked, and we've lived happily ever after.
Oh, and there's always that vernacular excuse---as well as colloquialisms. By the way, here in God's country, we UNTHAW our meat. What do the rest of you do? We also say SHERBERT, not sherBET. We also put rocks in a bucket, not stones in a pail.
