... "To leave that there would make some stink!
So thinking hard for all of us,
I scooped it up, heaved it
across the marriage counselor's fence."

Rae Armantrout, channeling Wm. Stafford. This is surely the definitive dead animal poem parody.

***

I was taught all those shibboleths about not splitting infinitives, not starting a sentence with "however," not using "hopefully" unless you mean "with hope," distingushing between which and that in restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, not ending sentences with prepositions. The idea was that these were not actual rules of grammar, but that some more "careful" writers and readers thought that they were, so if you broke these so-called rules these supposedly more careful writers would think you ignorant of them. Therefore you WERE ignorant, ipso facto, even if you were breaking the rules on purpose. It is a way of preserving meaningless prejudices: the more we follow these inane "rules," in an effort to not offend delicate octogenarian sentiments, the more legitimacy we are giving to these "rules," passing on absurd shibboleths to another generation. We will be the octogenarian grammar police for the next generation, even though we don't really believe in the rules we are enforcing. I still can't use "disinterested" to mean "uninterested," no matter how hard I try to overcome the prejudices inculcated in me.

A shibboleth, of course, is a word that only native speakers can pronounce. If you can't pronounce that phoneme in question, you are slaughtered. If you don't learn the E.B. White New Yorker code of style, you will seem a less adept writer to others of the tribe.