Just Because I Care About Syntax Does Not Make Me a Grammar Nazi

I frequently get accused of being a Grammar Nazi. I have to say, at first glance it seems as though this might even be a reasonable charge, based on my proclivity for using words like proclivity and my borderline obsession with dependent clauses. I did, after all, post a quote by George Orwell about the decay of language being connected to political chaos as my status on Facebook last week. However, I didn't mean it in the sense you probably assumed that I did. How biased of you.
I delineate sharply between myself and "language mavens" like the late Christopher Buckley. And in this delineation, I feel, lies the key to why I am in fact not a Grammar Nazi. Sure, I'll argue with people on the internet when the things they say make no sense, not even in the sense loose fashion of poetry. And there is a hell of a lot of it out there. It's kinda fun, despite the fact that it makes me look like a pretentious ass.
I don't mind nonsense. Really. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite musicians, and even he doesn't know what a lot of his songs mean. Or Hunter S. Thompson, a master of drug-crazed babbling. He's the one that said after all nonsense is all good, "as long as it sings,". What I meant by the George Orwell quote, and what Orwell meant himself, I'm guessing, had more to do with the semantic twisting of language by those who would spin and obscure the truth than it did about people not using grammar in the ordained way.
But the difference between myself and people who really do deserve the label of Language Nazi, or at least Language Fascist, is a deep one, and one that regards our respective understandings of how language exists.
To clarify, there is a bit of a gap, or at least a tension, between prescriptive and descriptive grammars. Prescriptivists like Avril Incandeza or Mr. Buckley seem to regard language as an edifice, a Platonic ideal the perfection thereof is to be aspired to. This is the grammar they teach you in school, and I have to admit, I can see the appeal. There isn't much like a perfectly crafted sentence. It's like a well rolled Cuban cigar or a really quality distilled bottle of Absinthe. Completely intoxicating.
But descriptive grammar, to me, seems to have more bearing on the world people actually live in. Everyone (except the rare feral child) speaks language, or language speaks through people, depending on how seriously you take Lacan and Baudrillard. However, the language that they speak is modified by where they grew up, their economic level, how much education they've gotten, how much they use the internet, any number of factors. Languages are composed of diverse dialects, and each dialect is composed of diverse idiolects. And as long as communication is achieved, it's functionally successful. Clarity can be measured by how successful the communication was, but even still, this leaves no place for the Queen's English or the dictates of the French National Academy of Language.
Who cares about all that formalized crap? Language derives from culture, and culture is a human phenomenon. And humans, living on earth, are constantly contending with difference, and the dynamic fact of being alive on a moss covered rock hurtling through space. So language changes as people change, as cultures change, as populations change, as meta-narratives rise and fall. Perfection against which to judge exists only in stasis, and stasis is a myth outside a lab or the depths of space. So speak, play with language. It's yours. It's ours. Keep changing it, because stasis is death and if we let it die then we are all of us fucked.