Also a Southerner, but my English teachers (beginning in the early grades) drilled us all the time on grammar. Even if we didn't always use the proper forms in everyday speech, we did when we wrote anything. In middle school, we diagrammed sentences till we could handle the most complicated one. Still a grammar Nazi.
Sorry, I was born in the South, and have a congenital defect when it comes to forming the English language.😁
But you're absolutely right. It's not so much a nation we inhabit, but a language
definitely
Also a Southerner, but my English teachers (beginning in the early grades) drilled us all the time on grammar. Even if we didn't always use the proper forms in everyday speech, we did when we wrote anything. In middle school, we diagrammed sentences till we could handle the most complicated one. Still a grammar Nazi.