Grammar for the masses

A couple grammatical things have been bothering me lately. No, none of them concern its and it's or there, their and they're, even though these are probably the most popular grammatical flaws in the English language and rest assured I have seen them written incorrectly a number of times in email and other things these last few months. But I just accept that people will always fuck those things up, so I'm not going to rant about them right now. What has really irritated me recently is the way that people use the word "seen" in the place of "see", or even worse, "saw". For example, while it would be correct to say "I see that you are not wearing any clothes", it would not be correct to say "I seen that you are not wearing any clothes". One could correctly say "I saw the nasty sex show last night" but should not say "I seen the nasty sex show last night". I've heard so many people in my lovely city say that and I think it makes them sound even more red neck-ish than I already thought they were. I keep waiting for Billy Bob to come up to me and say "I seen that movie last night about the gay cowboys and boy did it ever remind me of my childhood!". But alas, many of then people who use "seen" seem to be quite lovely, edu-macated people, which perplexes me all the more!

Secondly, I am mourning the loss of the "s" that use to once exist in the school subject Social Studies, or the abbreviated Socials. I only ever hear kids now say "Social", as opposed to "Socials" (which would make much more sense, as it is Social Studies, plural, in that one studies more than one area of social history, or whatever Social Studies teachers actually teach). When asked why this was, one teen said "well, we have just abbreviated Social Studies, and Social is quicker to say", to which I replied "well it's just fine to abbreviate it but Socials is just as many syllables as Social, so why leave out the s?". One co-worker seemed to recall calling it Social when she went to school as well, implying that I was in the wrong and that the currciculum of the province I attended school in used a different word then they do here. To that I say: harrrumpff!