The subjunctive appears to be a lost cause.
It sure appears to is. (Wait, can't I just use any form of "to be" to end that thought? I mean, since language is completely arbitrary? And let me plus, thought me agree alongwith.)
The fact is that language has no use if it's arbitrary. Even if you're speaking a secret language you and your twin invented in the forest, language must be a shared phenomenon to have any value.
I have to say, not to pick on anybody, that one guy here used "blue collar" correctly in one post (actually, close enough to be understood, although a "grammar nazi" would say it needed a hyphen). And then I think it was the same guy who said "blue color guys" in another post. I swear it took me about three beats to realize he wasn't talking about
So that was just one moment. Of
course I moved on. And of course, if we take things to extremes, we can make our writing equally unreadable. The classic example is "That is a situation up with which I shall not put."
It's nice to let out my inner pedant here
Where I work you can't take a leak without splashing the shoes of a PhD, and they all think they are excellent writers. To make matters worse, I have to edit for both print and Web (think blogs), and I write speeches as well. Spoken language is not written language -- that's speechwriting 101.
The best way to write the world's worst speech is to try to write "correctly." If you want to write the world's worst post, just "write what you're thinking" with no inner editor, or just "write as you'd talk."
It's an excuse that covers so much ground that people here -- not in this thread, but elsewhere on Patsfans -- write truly indecipherable gibberish. The more heated they get, the more indecipherable the writing. So it actually becomes impossible not to laugh, because you can tell how excited the person is by how little of the post you understand. I suppose it's communication, in a way.