First, as far as the “ask” gripe, it is perfectly understandable that people pronounce it the same as axe. The point of language is communication. That’s it. A well thought out language allows infinite expression with the greatest simplicity provided, and axe is significantly easier to pronounce than ask. You will notice the same difficulties with children, chilrun or chilluns.
Axe and ask are different enough in application that we are all quite capable of figuring out which meaning the person is expressing and so in many respects, it would make more sense to say axe. Does anyone know how knight was pronounced in the early days for god’s sake? As for its/it’s, they’re/their/there, if we are very capable of discerning which meaning is appropriate in the context of a conversation, why should we a spell a word that is contextually clear differently to indicate its meaning? If the problem were serious, the words would have different pronounciations.
Now for the “The children will bring their homework to class.” discussion. I think it’s Strunk and White who have another little book on grammar and as a seperate point, the phrase should really read “Children will bring homework to class.” Obviously you are not asking students to bring other student’s homework to class, so it is not necessary to include the article. In that vein, I have little tolerance for long-winded sentences. Get your point across.
There are hundreds of subtle things that you can ride people on such as different pronounciations of “the” with the short and long "e"s. There is a rule for when the long e should be used and short e, but they are impractical for everyday speech and they don’t add clarity to the language. That’s why the shall/will debate was finally dropped and will was adopted as the construction for all persons in the future. In the end though, proper English is still exactly what it used to be, a great divider.
English, the English we all (try) to speak now was once spoken in a very aloof and minute section of England. Thing was, they were the wealthy, and everyone wanted to imitate the classy, the wealthy. Things haven’t changed, proper English serves as a subtle moat between the well bred and the rest of the world. Why did no one complain about misuse of adverbs and adjectives: good/well, bad/badly. I consistently substitute the adjective for the adverb in passing conversation. Does this make me white trash?
Alas, what annoys me more than people’s failing grammar however are those who pretensiously correct it. In the first paragraph, it would not surprise me if someone got very excited to see “if the problem were” and thought, “shouldn’t it be ‘the problem was’” and jumped at the opportunity to “help” my grammar. Once a week it seems, someone discovers the English language’s limited use of the subjunctive.
And yes, “same difference” or “six of one, half a dozen of the other” make sense if you take a minute and think about it.