The sentence in question was this: "He don't like it." Four words. Three of them are acceptable. I pointed out the error - politely, calmly, the first time - and suggested the verb ought to agree with the subject, which is singular, and therefore the form must be *doesn't*. Marcin looked at me as though I had asked him to recite Mickiewicz in Swahili. He wrote "He don't like it" again. I corrected it again. He wrote it a third time with the same error, at which point I may have raised my voice approximately one half-tone, which in our household counts as a shouting match.
Now. I am aware that this forum contains people who will tell me that descriptivism permits "don't" in the singular and that I am being a prescriptivist tyrant. To those people I say: he is doing a graded homework exercise. The exercise has a correct answer. The correct answer is *doesn't*. There is no dialectal nuance available to a fourteen-year-old boy who simply could not be bothered to proofread a five-word sentence. Do not cite Webster to me. Do not cite the OED. I have read both, in the original, more recently than any of you.
What I find remarkable - and BackAgainLikeBadHair was, for once, entirely right about this in another thread - is that people will accept any amount of garbage on this board and defend it with their last breath, but the moment someone points out that a verb has to agree with its subject, suddenly everyone is a linguistics professor. The subject-verb agreement rule is not, and has never been, optional. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is not one of Gabriel's signs hidden in the grammar. It is basic English, learned by the age of ten in a decent school system, and if we cannot hold that line, we cannot hold any line at all
I love my brother. I helped him finish the worksheet. He got full marks. The final sentence read "He doesn't like it," and I expect this to be the high point of my week, which tells you everything about this week.
Marcin, if you ever find this forum: you know what you did.
-- GV