In an essay about television David Foster Wallace (he of the long name and even longer books) described a professor, "He was the type of person who used which even when the correct pronoun was that because it sounds fancier." I'm paraphrasing. The essay is called E Unibas Pluram and it was published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again. You can look it up for yourself if you want.
So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.
Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.
Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.
There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.
Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.
There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.
Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.
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