So while it's true that many shows use laugh tracks in the place of jokes (The Big Bang Theory is an obvious example), a lot of other shows use laugh tracks because they're trying to make you feel like you're part of the show's community. Shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother are about a fun group of people who hang out and have adventures and care about each other. How I Met Your Mother is even shot from the perspective of someone who is hanging out at the bar with their buddies.

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In fact, you might even argue that the strength of the show was how it created something similar to the feeling of hanging out with a bunch of old friends who you love and trust.

This isn't a universal constant, obviously -- Seinfeld used laugh tracks, and no one would wanna be friends with those jerks. But it should be clear that anyone who's dismissing a laugh track as pointless or stupid or condescending just doesn't understand what the tool is doing, or is just incapable of feeling companionship with other humans.

People who correct others' grammar seem to assume that grammatical rules were handed down on high from some kind of unimpeachable entity, and that anyone who doesn't talk right simply hasn't been shown the light. But the opposite is true: Humanity developed language as a community effort, then some people noticed patterns and wrote them down. But the rules were slightly different everywhere, so eventually, one ruling class decided to use it as an excuse to punish poor people who say "y'all" or live in the inner city.

"But there have to be rules," says the Snob, "or language devolves into chaos." Only there are rules. Every dialect ever, from the nasally Midwestern to the slow Southern drawl to Valley Girl gibberish to the Mark Whalbergian shrieks of Boston, has its own strictly followed rules, even if the speakers don't know they follow them. You follow hundreds of "rules" without realizing them, because instead of being taught them by a stern teacher, you just heard it as a baby and internalized it without ever saying it out loud. The best example is this one:

"Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out."

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Terrifying tall 31-year-old rectangular orange French lunatic.

I guarantee that none of you knew that rule unless you saw that it went viral on Twitter last month, and yet it's undeniably true. You can probably think of a couple exceptions to it, but the article explains most of them away, because it's slightly more complicated than I have the space to get into here.

"Why do you talk to your co-workers like that, brah?" the Snob asks.

"Like what?"

"You totally switched into a different voice. Why? Why do you have to put on an act for them? Why can't you just be real with them?"

What to Tell Him

You're probably familiar with the idea of code-switching in broad terms -- how people talk in slightly different dialects or accents, depending on who they're talking to and when. Even if we don't notice it in ourselves, we notice it in people we're close to. Like when your significant other talks to her mother on the phone and suddenly has a thick Boston accent. But even if you've accepted that there are multiple version of the "real" you, that's still just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to code-switching.

I dealt with this concept a lot back when I worked in a high school, teaching a writing class to a largely poor, minority studentry. I had a lot of students who were frustrated that they had to write in a different way than how they spoke. They felt like this was contrary to the "Be true to yourself" message that was built into every other facet of pop culture. And it is, because their "true selves" aren't acceptable in mainstream professional culture. They had to learn a new way to be. And it was up to me to teach them! And I didn't even have a teaching degree. (Luckily, their other teachers did.)

So is forcing people to code-switch bad? No, because different types of communication lend themselves better to different situations. Here's a story about how a bilingual school developed a hybrid French/English "code" among the co-workers, because some ideas are better expressed in English, and some in French. For example, there's "Un programme de planned giving," because "Planned Giving" is a bit of nonprofit lingo that doesn't exist in French.

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If it's not a weird sex act or a chocolate-covered cigarette, the French can't be bothered to describe it.

I guess my point is that the ways everyone communicates are so rich and complex and weird that it'd be a shame to dismiss any one way as "not real." It'd be downright snobby. And you know how I feel about the snobs.

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Not fondly.

The argument goes that preserving a proper, professional environment means enforcing standards in attire. Uniforms, after all, are a good way to promote unity in schools, in the military, and in a lot of professional environments. No one is saying that you can't do that. But it's also insanely obvious that sometimes it's just an excuse for people to be sexist, racist, or just exclusionary dicks -- like the bar in New York City which made up a rule banning "baggy jeans and bling," but had no problem with ripped jeans, baseball hats, and "stylishly" filthy backpacks (just typing that phrase made me realize that not only am I no longer cool, but I have no interest in it whatsoever).

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"Sure, but wash it."

For a social species, it's weird how obsessed we are with being exclusionary and condescending. We don't want to admit to ourselves that we're talking down to people, so we come up with arbitrary rules which just so happen to keep a certain type out, and then shrug our shoulders and say, "Hey, it's just the way things are." (For an example, scroll down to the comments!) Or we just come up with labels for people we don't like. Labels like "outsider" or "snob."

... Wait.