In a similar vein, I remember a conversation in college that has stuck with me for years. I went to an Ivy league school so presumably most people were by some measure "intelligent." My friends were discussing prejudice based on regional accents, i.e. if they talked in their native accent with colloquial grammar, people assumed that they were less intelligent. The people involved in the conversation had heavy accents and were from the South, NY/NJ and New England. They envied my "neutral" California accent.
Later, I visited the home of one of these friends. She lived on Long Island and came from a working class family. At college, she had been working on neutralizing her accent. When I was there, her mother yelled at her for "putting on airs" and thinking that she was better than the family. She really felt torn between two worlds and literally had to speak two different versions of English depending upon where she was.
To a certain extent, I treat online grammar as a regional accent. I also happen to be married to a gifted dyslexic. My DH can spell the same word three different ways that are phonetically correct in a single paragraph. They all seem correct to his brain. I recognize my own prejudice when I see things like "me and my husband said it was rediculous." I still cringe but I try to look for the content.
