wow, great post Echnida!
your aside about the subjunctive is very telling. My grandparents used to freak out because I read books! - that somehow book learning could hurt me. They believed that my mother could only bear GIRL children because she had only one ovary, etc, etc.
So from an early age I understood that a lot of the criticism was based on their ignorance. So I learned to discount it greatly. They were poor uneducated people whose own parents beat them for their misbehaviors in a world where it was okay to beat your wives, children, and dogs.