The Sin of Wrath I

We are not alone.

They lurk among us, often unbeknownst to us. They wait in hiding, sometimes under our very noses, anticipating the perfect moment to strike. Waiting for a dangling preposition to strike upon. Waiting for a verb and subject that doesn't quite match. Waiting for a chain of sentences whose verbs are improperly conjugated (as gerunds, the horror!). They leap in, slap us in our linguistic faces, and smile with that Knowing Smile that makes you want to rip their filthy pedant's lips right off their know-it-all faces.

These are our Grammar Nazi friends, and we love them, in a crucifying kind of way.

For instance, we’ve all been told to say “She and I went to the park,” and not “her and me.” But does anyone have that friend who will correct your “She picked her and me up at the park,” with a “she and I?” I call B.S, Grammar Nazi friend. Wipe that Knowing Smile off your face, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Some pronouns are direct objects.

My best friend has a strange affinity with the subjunctive “were,” as in “If I were a rich girl, na na na na na na na na na na na na.”

One slip up, one utterance of “if only I was cuter...” is enough for a slap on the wrist from this helpful young man. And one day I asked him “do you know why it’s “were” and not “was?”

“Yes.” That Knowing Smile, once again. I briefly drifted off to an imaginary dimension you get a special government stipend for every Grammarian you uppercut. “It’s conditional,” he said.

"It's not. It’s subjunctive." Now I may, may, possibly have made a tiny little barely-noticeable Knowing Smile, there. I may have screamed it gleefully and knowingly and obnoxiously and rudely (and let's be honest. Drunkenly.) I may have been completely uppercutworthy in that moment.

This desire to punch people, or rip off their lips, or drive them to the middle of the Mojave desert and leave them to starve and/or get eaten by gila monsters, is what's known as Sin of Wrath. And while as a human-being, I fully understand the justification for this particular sin in this context, as a reformed Grammar-Nazi myself, I feel obligated to explain that it really isn't necessary.

Just refer them to the next post.

And yes, I was once one of these horrible, horrible people, because I loved languages almost as much as my cat (I have a nasty, janky, scrawny little black cat named Pedro, and we're best friends. Write that one down.) I still do love languages, but I think it’s important not to fool yourself into thinking that knowing grammar is the same thing as knowing language. I did my best this year to learn a little bit about, for instance, the English language, and learned something really interesting about it:

Modern English is one big. Fat.

Juicy. Sinful.

Grammatical error.

I think I just felt a shudder. To be continued...