Yeah, he crammed 'em into 14,000 words and 52 footnotes instead.
DFW has a lot of virtues, but I don’t think he was ever fairly accused of being succinct.
Personally, I’m a bigger fan of when Joyce touched on these issues in…well…most of his work. 
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I see them as people who are unwilling or unable to organize their thoughts in order to clearly communicate them to others.
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AFAIK the english language wasn’t codified until mid/late 18th century. Building the first British Empire apparently worked out fine without codification, despite needing lots of written communication i.e. colonies and stuff.
And since we are in the age of the internet we should have/show some leniency. Using the internet usually means you have to constantly fight autocorrection and autocomplete and tiny touch-screens. There comes the point in this struggle when you’re happy you’ve squeezed out some sort of a coherent sentence and don’t give a shit about one misplaced apostrophe any more.
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Also, I’m going to repost a quote I like from a previous thread from language maven William Safire:
" A note about Authority: In these pages, you will be given The Word about The Words. Here is what I think about what is correct and constructive, what is imprecise and destructive. You may disagree, as many of my articulate and scholarly (or plain ornery) readers do. It’s your language too, buddy; if you want to abuse it and muddle it up, you will do that for yourself, not for me. If, on the other hand, you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership."
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I noticed that the person in charge of graphics for this little diatribe didn’t seem to understand the difference between “curly” quotation marks and apostrophes, and foot and inch marks.
Typography 101: it’s not snobbery to believe that knowing how to use your tools actually matters.
And when you don’t know, it shows – and your work looks like shit. Amateur hour.
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Even when something like that turns out to be well-written, technical issues aside, such flaws are serious impediments to readability.
I’ve almost entirely given up trying to parse that kind of wall-of-text. Very rarely one will have an opening sentence that grabs me strongly enough to make me endure the discomfort, but it has to be one hell of a fine opening.
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English has never been truly codified in the sense that French, Spanish and German (?) are, with their (almost) universally recognized authorities making pronouncements on grammar and spelling, which all users are expected to adopt and follow. English has no such authorities, only descriptive dictionaries and bitter debates among users.
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Internet conversation aren’t like submitting a paper. It’s casual language. Almost like Graffiti.
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Well, this is a British production. They don’t use “quotation marks” they use “inverted commas.” 
But, that being said, by all means, let the orthographic pedantry commence. Extra points for your use of smart quotes in your own post.
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“Figuratively”. The two words’ meanings should be switched. After all, literally (like literary) comes from letters, which are used for metaphors and to describe the highest flights of fancy. Figures, on the other hand, are numbers. Nice, solid, and reliable. What you use for measurements, and statistics. They capture truth.
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Hmm… I just visited the Guardian, opened the first story I saw with quotes in the headline, and this is what came up:
For as long as Alice, now 32, can remember, her father, “a major drug dealer with freezers full of cocaine”, was physically abusive towards her and her mother. “My first memory is of him backing us to the front door with a gun, saying he’d kill her, kill me and kill himself one day.”
Sorry about the grim content, but those look very much like curly quotation marks to me…! (If you were joking and it whooshed right over my head, than shame on me.)
Or, even something more stream of consciousness. I do that sometimes. I’ll look at something I wrote that is a butchery of grammar and decide the flow of associations is more important that doing the work of sorting out how to best structure a thought into correct sentences. Either way can get the point across.
I think there was a bit of a disconnect. I provided a link to what I was referring to, which is the term used in British English for what we call quotation marks. I wasn’t referring to the typography itself, just the general term. I’d love to be able to blame poor grammar for this error, thus bolstering the case that good grammar aids clear communication; however, I think it was just unclear writing on my part. Not all bad writing is bad grammar.
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Right, the point is that you can’t talk about the meaning of words without going meta. Words mean what they mean in context. They are hints, not values. The idea that each word has a specific meaning is simply wrong, and not only wrong in the sense that it’s not true, but wrong in the sense that it literally (and I mean literally literally here) cannot be true.
If it were literally true that words have specific, exact meanings, then it would have to be the case that whenever I attempt to communicate something to you, the exact idea forms in your mind that was in my mind when I formed the words. Think about that for a minute. Think about all the places where the possibility of that happening isn’t. And then you can be free, finally, of the idea that the word literal has any literal meaning.
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A quick click on your link reveals that I missed what you took the trouble to explain quite clearly. Mea culpa; I now wear the Cone of Shame.
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I think that’s the joke. Same thing, different name.
It seems the Guardian is here using more of an American than a British approach (double instead of single quotes), though that comma outside the quotation marks after cocaine makes me ill. So ugly. And I’m not sure if it’s intentional or just legendary “Grauniad” sloppiness.
Edit: redundant post. Sorry.
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Her examples are examples. Her point is not that it’s racist and oppressive to correct peoples’ grammar. Her point is that it is frequently the case that when people are correcting other peoples’ grammar, or discounting their words based on their grammar or diction, the purpose of doing so is to exclude them for reasons having nothing to do with a failure to communicate.
She is not saying we shouldn’t study grammar in school. She is saying when someone is trying to communicate with you, and instead of responding to what they say, you respond to their grammar, that is wrong.
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“For reals.” ?
Even in those context though, things like official French coexists along side multiple, highly variable regional dialects and even other distinct but related languages. And there are often concerns about the official version slowly killing those less formalised versions.
Along with awesome weird like Ireland’s attempt to re-introduce modern formalised Irish for daily use. Which has failed largely. But in the attempt they accidentally grafted a bunch of Irish words and stricture into Hiberno-english.
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Similar vein
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