This will be my last post under this name for reasons, but I wanted to do a question I’ve been interested in asking so it can be useful in a way (inspired by the person I have interacted with the most on here who says she follows all the mentioned rules as per the new year).

Once in a blue moon, someone I know will mention they have some kind of linguistic rule they invented in order to make understanding them easier.

The four examples that come to the top of my head:

1. A couple of people I know are on the spectrum and noticed it’s sometimes difficult to tell when someone is done speaking, which makes it difficult for them to not interrupt people. To prevent people from having to experience that with them, they made a rule, which a number of us follow now, where they are officially done talking when something they’re saying becomes divisible by 17 words, choosing 17 because it’s the number of syllables in a haiku.
2. Based on this, another rule was invented where, if a whole uninterrupted utterance (or, more regularly, a sentence) is divisible by 18 words, it’s completely dismissible as having no correspondence with anything in reality. It allows things said, say, under duress, to be ignored based on that cue. A prerequisite though is that the person must have intended to end what they were saying.
3. Suppose you have two or more people you’re interviewing. They all want to be anonymous, which means they will just be silhouettes while on a screen, and their voices will be morphed. However, this means that when someone self-references, nobody will know which one they’re talking about. For situations like this, a number of us use a grammar rule that modifies the use of words like “I”, “me”, “you”, etc. to use accents over the first letters of each word when spelled as a distinguisher (the alphabetical order of the accents match the age order of the anonymous participants), and these manifest as the speed in which the word is said during pronunciation (the speed of the words when spoken match the age order of the anonymous participants).
4. A few people I know have adopted this quirk one of us invented that is inspired by the fact Mandarin uses tones in words (it can be turned off though if what you are saying does not consistently use this rule). In old Mandarin, a tone in a word can completely change the word’s meaning into another “word”, such as “mǎi” meaning “to buy” and “mài” meaning “to sell”. Inspired by this, a grammatical rule was invented where a word’s tone would indicate how literal it is. For example, on the do re mi scale, mi and fa would indicate that a word or phrase spoken in it might be intended to mean a parallel for something else, such as if you said “ship” in the tone to mean “whale”. A word, phrase, sentence, etc. that is spoken in so or la would mean the word is supposed to be a literary stand-in, an analogy, an allegory, a parable, etc. For example, if you said “hand” in this tone, if you were talking about a flower, you could mean “leaf”, or you could say “galactus” to mean a black hole. A word spoken in doe (low doe) or re would imply something that’s a “quasi” of a certain thing, something that’s technically something, something that’s partially something, etc. For example, if you said “adult” in doe (low doe) or re, it could mean “teen” or “kid”. And anything said in ti or doe (high doe) would indicate they mean the opposite of something. For example, saying “cop” in ti or (high) doe could mean “robber”. This is a rule invented for constructed languages though and isn’t necessary in English, though some use it.

Sorry, I went too in-depth. What are some unofficial grammar rules you’ve seen people “invent” and use consistently?