Reddit reviews American English: Dialects and Variation (Language in Society)

Hi, I'm the OP. I'm also a professional editor who literally has to be varying degrees of pedantic for a living.

And I'm here to tell you that language evolves, English isn't math (i.e., you can't determine the meaning of a sentence by considering each fragment in isolation and then adding all the pieces together), and you need to stop being overly literal in an attempt to impress people with how smart you are, because all it demonstrates is that you don't actually understand linguistics at all.

If you're a genuinely intellectually curious autodidact instead of an armchair grammarian who just likes throwing obnoxiously outdated prescriptivism around, I would recommend spending some quality time with a copy of American English: Dialects and Variation by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling. It's one of the textbooks from the first linguistics course I took in college—the one that completely shattered and rebuilt my world.

Another Redditor who sourced it from this.