Automatic reflex to correct grammar ? Why?

Model correct grammar. Bite thy tongue unless you are in a position to actually teach the other. Your learning how not to speak may be more difficult than their learning how to speak.

You would probably enjoy Grammarly---check it out at https://www.facebook.com/grammarly?ref=br_tf

Great grammar posts, including the recently posted "10 Words and Phrases That Too Many Folks Say Incorrectly" including "Supposably" and "Expresso." If those don't send chills running up your spine, nothing will.

Understand that you've been 'programmed' to do this.

Teaching of grammar/usage is very frequently mixed inextricably with value judgements (ones chiefly rooted in classism) - the idea that people who use language differently from the way you were taught are substandard in some way.

You need to learn to grasp - intellectually, if not as a gut feeling - that your reaction is a taught one, relating to frequently arbitrary opinions on usage.

People seem to have an instinct that convinces them that they somehow occupy a privileged position in the grand scheme of things. I imagine that our genes built us up to have an inflated sense of self-importance so that we would not be reticent when it came to competing for mates and passing on our genes. In order to come across as less arrogant, you need to recognise that your sense of superiority is a delusion, and that really, you are no more "correct" than the people you are "correcting".

Many people used to believe that the planet Earth was at the centre of the universe and that all the other planets revolved around it. We now know that this is not the case, and that the Earth does not occupy any special position in the solar system. *Any* planet would look like the special one from the parochial viewpoint of someone who has always lived on it and is too narrow-minded to imagine having grown up on a different planet.

Many people used to believe that human beings were a special creation with dominion over all the other animals. We now know that this is not the case, and that we are just another great ape, and that all animals are our cousins. We're being *very* slow at ditching the idea of dominion over all the other animals, though...

Many people used to believe that the god of their culture was the one true god, and that all the gods of all the other cultures were just imagined. We now know that the traditional religious beliefs of all cultures are of equal silliness, and that there is no god. Okay, most of us *don't* know that yet. But *any* religion would feel like the one true religion from the parochial viewpoint of someone who has been brought up by their parents to believe in it and is too narrow-minded to imagine having been brought up by different parents in a different culture.

In just the same way that people are deluded into thinking that they are at the centre of the universe, the top of the tree, and the apple of their god's eye, many people are deluded into thinking that the arbitrary dialect of the arbitrary language that they happen to have grown up speaking is the One True Way of Speaking, and that everyone else who has been brought up differently is somehow "wrong". They seem completely oblivious to the fact that the language that they speak has been continually changing since language began, and that their way of speaking would sound just as "wrong" to their ancestors as modern vernacular sounds to them.

There is no "correct" grammar. The grammar of every language and every dialect of every language is different. All these different bodies of grammatical rules have been continually changing since language began, and will continue to change until language as we know it dies out.

Your way of speaking is just a dot on a huge, many-limbed tree of human language whose roots lie hundreds of thousands if not millions of years in the past, with branches and twigs more numerous and more twisted than you can imagine. Every way of speaking in the world is a dot somewhere on that tree, and many of those dots have people worshipping them as you worship your dot, declaring their dots to be the One True Way of Speaking, too.

These people all suffer the same delusion as you. They all think that their dot occupies a special, privileged position on the great Tree of Language. Really, none of them do. They are all equal. The "I could have been someone" dot is just one dot amongst millions, and the "I could of been someone" dot is right there next to it, just a fraction of a millimetre further out along one twig.

Any ideas? Yes. Accept that you are not special. That you are not better than the people you purport to "correct". That you have simply been hoodwinked into thinking you are by your pesky genes. You can overcome them.

Yes,you are one of those toffee nose arrogant people.