Matt, I have some questions and comments about your pointed post:
1. I’d like to probe the limits of your embrace of “arbitrary convention”. Assume that the convention had developed that the possessive singular of nouns ending in “ss” is formed merely by adding an apostrophe (without a further “s”). You agree with me that that form is grotesque, and I’m guessing that you also agree that it is (as the author of the essay I linked to explains) “completely illogical”. Would you, in my hypothetical, nonetheless embrace the convention? Would you consider it illegitimate to combat it? (And please don’t contend that such an unsound convention couldn’t possibly have developed. Worse conventions, on matters more important than punctuation, obviously did.)
Or consider the ongoing collapse of the American convention that “everyone” requires a singular pronoun and the developing convention that permits “everyone” to be matched with “their”. (Grammar of course evolves, as the playful title of your post suggests.) Once that new convention is established, must you acquiesce in it?
2. You label as “arbitrary” the convention that commas and periods are inserted inside the quotation marks, and, in comparing me to Hobbes, you seem to agree that my practice is “clean[er]” and more “rational”. Do you in fact agree?
3. Depending on your answers to the foregoing questions, I wonder if your embrace of arbitrary conventions is less categorical than your post would suggest and instead turns on a qualitative judgment about how illogical the arbitrary convention is. (To be clear: I would find such a position eminently reasonable.) You and I may then simply have different judgments on where to draw the line.
4. I think that your “Hobbesian” epithet is unfair. Your own account of Hobbes indicates that he favored “commands of an absolute sovereign from on high”. Beyond not having the “sovereign authority to enforce [my] will”, I’m not calling for any authority to impose my view. I’m instead engaging in my own “humble gropings” towards a better practice for the “organic community”.
5. I hadn’t been aware that there is any precedent for my practice. But a former law clerk to the venerable Judge John Minor Wisdom has just informed me that Judge Wisdom employed the same practice. Here’s the first example I ran across (from a 1986 opinion by Judge Wisdom):
Indeed, “prior restraints upon speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights”.
So even if my practice is “unconservative” (in not adhering doggedly to arbitrary convention), there is certainly Wisdom in it.