Why I'm Not a Grammar Nazi

I have two bones to pick with this e card. First, I'll probably be humming along with the Pussycat Dolls all day. The second bone is much more long winded, so keep reading and I'll be your friend.

I took a class in college called Advanced Grammars. On the first day, the professor asked us why we were interested in grammar. My naive response was something along the lines of, "I like being a grammar nazi." He looked disturbed, nodded,  and moved on. Throughout the semester, I grew rather embarrassed about my response, as I learned the difference between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar. The professor was (and is, of course) a linguist, and he favored the descriptive. He taught us that language is ever-evolving and that supposedly incorrect usage eventually becomes acceptable and even correct with popular usage.

Meanwhile, I was also learning more about prescriptive grammar in my other classes. My favorite English professor of all time was a hardcore prescriptivist. The Little, Brown Handbook was her Bible. She taught us what is CORRECT in Standard American English (SAE). We were not to split infinitives (see?), and the correct possessive form of the last name Jones would be Jones's (I've never met anyone else who does that cause it looks crazy). I still hold these things dear when it comes to writing. I love Oxford commas as much as the next librarian. Sometimes I feel irked when sentences end with prepositions. But I also begin sentences with conjunctions, and when asked how I'm doing I usually answer, "good," instead of, "well." Thus, I may correct someone's non-SAE speech in my head, and I am amused by really poor writing and obviously unedited publications, but I try to avoid practicing grammar nazism. (Don' t get me wrong, though. I do believe it's important that English speaking people learn SAE as well as they can for the sake of their futures).

Case in point, the image up there. A kazillion people have already pointed this out all over the interwebs, but I'll do it again for fun. The SAE version of that sentence would be, "Don't you wish your girlfriend were grammatically correct like me?" because it's subjunctive. Some people believe it should end with, "like I," as well. See more of that argument here. Moreover, an English teacher somewhere pointed out that a person cannot be grammatically correct-- only the language can do that. A person can merely speak or write in a grammatically correct fashion. Of course the card is amusing, and of course that's how the song goes, and of course that's how most of us speak every day, but it isn't "grammatically correct" in the way most self-professed grammar nazis would want it to be (woops).

There are a few possibilities about the provenance of this image. Most likely someone with an incomplete grasp of SAE was attempting to be REALLY EFFING WITTY. However, it may have been the work of a clever trouble maker who wanted to rile the grammar nazis. That would be really effing witty indeed.

Long story short, that's why I am a reformed grammar nazi. There are FOUR topics that are inappropriate for polite conversation due to their inflammatory nature: religion, politics, the great pumpkin, and grammar. Grammar nazis cannot possibly speak perfect English because perfect English doesn't exist, and even if it did, nobody would get it right all the time. Inevitably, grammar nazis face the same fate as those who assume.