Question on English Language to British Members

Thing is, these rules only exist in the minds of those who advocate them. There is no rulebook of English. There've been many different grammar and style handbooks, but they all mutually contradictory in at least some bits. Despite the pretensions of some of those who write them, the best a grammar guide can help to do, like a dictionary, is describe a step in an evolutionary process - not a hard and fast rule. Anyone who thinks that 'Me and Dave went shopping' or 'with who?' are grammatically incorrect is deeply confused.When someone tries to criticise you for failing to obey a 'rule' like not using conjunctions at the start of the sentence, the correct approach is not to discuss whether the rule is necessary; but to inform them that they're talking out of their arse about the rule even existing, preferably with quotes from great literature if possible.

In this case I think the better approach is just to blindly obey the arbitrary desires of whoever decides whether you're getting accepted/published! Although, having said that, I do remember once going on a rant at lecturer who returned a paper with "American" repeatedly crossed out and replaced by "United States" and with "'80s" changed to "1980s". Yes, there's ambiguity in the abstract sense, but there really wasn't in context.

I don't think it's even close to being true that Americans have worse grammar or English in general than the British. I can only assume the confusion comes from limited exposure to British people on a day to day basis, with people like David Attenborough or BBC news presenters standing in as the archetype. Trust me, that's not how the average person speaks.

I don't think it's right to call this an error, as many of the people who speak like this are perfectly aware of formal grammar. I say 'them ones'; I use 'us' as the first person singular pronoun in the accusative; and I say 'mesen' instead of 'myself', but none of these are mistakes. They're dialect.My personal gripes are always more with spelling, anyway. It's grammar, not grammer.

If they're trying to use formal, textbook grammar, it's an error. Otherwise, it's dialect. Well, dialect or your own idiosyncratic form of speech, anyway. I've noticed I even do that myself sometimes, though. I don't think it's through any failure to understand the difference (well, it might be in some cases, but I'm pretty sure I know which spelling is which!}. It's just that your conscious brain isn't fully briefed in everything going on while you're typing - especially when half-asleep at work. I think you just subconsciously make a phonetic connection between the sound and one of the spellings without any real awareness of what your fingers are doing.Lastly - to those complaining about 'at all' - what's the issue? We can't go getting rid of speech patterns simply because they add nothing to the meaning of a sentence. We keep them to give our speech rhythm and style."D'you want owt from the shop?' has a different feel to 'D'you want owt from the shop, at all?' It doesn't matter if the meanings are identical.

Depends where you're from. I think I tend to say the 'the' nowadays, as my way of speaking's been all softened by the necessity of making myself comprehensible to foreigners. The way I grew up saying it there was still a residual trace of the word though. Not quite a 't' sound, more like just a sharp stop in the flow of air where 'the' should be. I've always thought of it as a kind of verbal punctuation mark, indicating the abbreviation.