@Pat Because they're cowards who desperately need the people around them to keep lowering their expectations?
You mean they intentionally err so when they actually mess up, people will think they were just kidding?
@Pat Kind of. It's like how sometimes adults will speak in a childlike way after getting busted for doing wrong to try to avoid consequences.
They see people laugh at kids who make mistakes and call those mistakes "cute" and think it should apply to their grown-ass adult life too, because they refuse to take personal responsibility.
Obviously, there are degrees of this, but I've seen it often enough to understand such people tend to be wholly unreliable.
I noticed it first with the word "authorities" but have since seen it with other mass nouns/collective nouns.
I didn't notice people doing it until just recently, within the last decade. I thought there might be some more specific explanation for it.
>"I was speaking to a more generalized pattern."
As a generalized reason, I thought maybe they were intentionally providing an incorrect example of speech so that those who didn't know the difference would imitate the mistake, like some educators will intentionally teach incorrect facts to students to sabotage lower class people or a particular minority group.
@Pat Seems more likely to me that they're just imitating a style that they think is "cutesie".
>'Seems more likely to me that they're just imitating a style that they think is "cutesie".'
Yeah, probably most of them don't know why and are just imitating. But whoever started it must know why they started it. 😄
@Pat One would hope.
@Pat Entirely possible. Could be a cultural thing.
I was speaking to a more generalized pattern.