IELTS speaking test - an unusual meal

I propose the following negative ratings scale:

-1: "I take no leave of you."
-2: "I send no compliments to your mother."
-3: "You deserve no such attention."
-4: "I am most seriously displeased."

I tell about myself

Steven, I'm not talking about non-native speakers. If all we did were to wait for everyone to acquire — by themselves! — enough mastery of English to speak, say, at a reasonable college graduate level, we'd have to wait a long wait. And what if your classmate Ellard from the no-grammar class thought that "fork" and "lamp" had 2 syllables, spelled "faw-werk" and "lay-yump"? (Thinking about Larry Shue's "Foreigner" now.) Would that be the new rule? How are you going to have a written language where all native speakers — let alone everyone else — would understand each other then?

English is not deficient anymore than any other language. It's got its own quirks, other languages got theirs. Say, Russian has no articles, but hey, we manage somehow.

I'd say, his critique of grammar rules IS artificial and nonsensical. I mean, try to take Noam Chomsky at his word here and imagine that a man of his intellect was taught, but could not remember, to say "we shall" but "you will". Yeah, sure. More likely, he consciously decided to ignore this rule, as many other people did.

Grammar is not some sort of fake news. It is a way to codify what previously used to be informal rules. Informal rules may vary, but once they codified, invariably some win and others... well, they get to complain about how rules are difficult and unnatural. When the natural spoken language changes, those changes eventually make their way into its codified written version. One wants to separate short-term fads from long-term shifts here, hence the changes in the written language occur slowly and only once there is enough pressure to change from the carriers of the language. English, like many other languages, used to have verbs with more forms in their conjugations; gradually, some of those forms faded away. "Shall" is now chiefly a modal verb, at least in the US English. But it's not some kind of a weird exception: "art" the verb went the way of "thou" a lot earlier, and so did "doth" and "dost", and "ye" and "thee".

Here is another example. Lately, there has been a somewhat collective effort to find or invent pronouns that would mean "he or she", "his or her", etc. because using those phrases is kind of awkward. (E.g., "Every user of this website would like to feel that he or she is welcome here, and his or her work is appreciated by his or her fellow italkiers.") I've read and seen and heard many people try to invent all kinds of interesting words, but my bet is on the ungrammatical "they" — ungrammatical because how can you use plural to mean singular, pfft. ("You", get it?) But still I'm pretty sure that after a few years (or decades?) of usage this would become the norm and the rule. But not right away.

My family.

The Middle Ages.