Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: When One Notices Grammar
Your life can really be wrecked by having good grammar. How? There are only three ways, not ten, like last week’s blog. So, this blog will be shorter.
The
people who will correct you when you’re engaging in Umgangschprache. Not that
they know what Umgangschprache
is. Of course not, because they’ve spent
all their time refining their English grammar, not learning German. They are
like people who brush their teeth so often that they have receding gums. Or people who comb their hair so much that it’s
perfectly kempt but their hair is naturally (too) thin owing to the repetitions
of combing. Or, worse. Those people who have perfectly groomed dogs that look
just like them. And, by the way, the people are perfectly groomed, too. And
they walk their dogs in the park and the dog’s leash and collar and sometimes
even little doggy-jacket are color-coordinated with that of their perfectly
groomed master. You get the idea. These people are like fetish people. Toe
fetish people, who crave sucking on your toes.
Not that there is no room in the world for such people—I just don’t want
them sucking my toes, that’s all. Fortunately, politically correct people (who
are by now horrified, if they are still reading) have supplanted a lot of the
Annoyers, because they are actually more
annoying than the Annoyers. And you can
thank God for the PC folks, if you’re a grammar Annoyer, to do which (i.e.
thanking God) is probably not PC.
The Grammar Observers. Okay, say you’re lucky enough not to be an Annoyer. There is also the category
of Grammar Observer. These are what you might call grammar voyeurs. They are
like people with voracious sexual appetites who have decided to take holy
orders, and now have to suppress their desires.
On the surface of this, it sounds innocent enough. But these are really
people who notice bad grammar and simply stuff the urge to correct it deep, deep
down in their souls. They are deeply troubled individuals. It’s not that they
want to suck your toes, exactly, but they would love at least to see what your
foot looks like without a shoe, or even better, without a sock. Not that they
would suck it or even touch it; but they would want to, really, really want to.
Okay, that’s weird, but that’s these people. They are deeply suppressed, and
most of them wind up in therapy at some point.
The Grammar Whizzes. This one is less likely to wreck your life per
se than the first two, but it can. These people are better than your computer
at grammar. More to the point: they are better than their own computers. They
actually hate grammar/spell check—they turn it off because it is too often
wrong. (And, just so you know, the grammar/spell check feature is only wrong once
per 100,000 words, on average.) But that is simply “too often” for the Whizzes.
When they find an “error” in the grammar/spell check, they actually write a letter
to Microsoft. If there are any “errors” in the response—and I put quote marks around
the word because they are not necessarily errors per se—they circle them and
sent the letter back to the writer of the letter. That’s their favorite thing in the world to do. These
folks are weird. Forget the toes. Forget
the socks. Forget the analogy. These Whizzes have some kind of power grab fetish,
and they use grammar to get their jollies.
So how can noticing other people’s grammar ruin your
life? If you’re in category one to
three, you need some help. You need therapeutically to write a grammatically incorrect
sentence. You need to listen to country
music and try to like it—for there are many infelicitous moments, grammatically
speaking, in country music. Probably purposefully so, by the way, but
infelicitous, nonetheless.
So, what’s the deal? Speak bad, lighten up, relax. The computer
will fix you’re grammare. Works for me.
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