The 'I Love Grammar' Lady

 

“I love grammar!” a woman who works in my building announced.

She had opened her newspaper the day before and, to her surprise, saw a picture of me  -- someone she’s seen milling about on the fifth floor of her office building regularly for years. The community news division of the Los Angeles Times had just launched a Pasadena local news insert in the main paper. In it was my grammar column accompanied by my headshot.

The Pasadena resident and L.A. Times subscriber was thrilled. She and her friends frequently talk about grammar and all the awful mistakes people make, she told me. So she was excited to see a grammar column in her paper.

My stomach sank.

I get a lot of e-mails from “grammar fans” that say pretty much the same thing: They’re delighted to see that someone – finally – is fighting the good fight against sloppy usage and eroding grammar standards.

And I always wonder: Are these people who have only recently discovered the column? Or are they longtime readers who are just really good at selective interpretation?

The latter seems common. For example, here’s some “praise” I got recently from a reader: “Hallelujah! Someone (besides my dorky self) is pointing out that ‘is comprised of’ is always wrong.”

That’s not what I said, even though that's what he read.

But some people – a lot, in fact – think that anyone who takes an interest in grammar is crusading for the readers’ own personal peeves.

So it’s quite possible that the people who cheer my "crusade" are not new readers but long-term readers who just hear what they want to hear. Eventually I disappoint them all. I’m not the enforcer they want me to be. In time they see that I’m not lecturing about the evils of split infinitives or sentence-ending prepositions or sentences begun with “and” or whatever other peeves they harbor.

I’m used to that – in my e-mail in-box. But now, for the first time, I was facing one of these prescriptivist grammar fans in person. And I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

A few weeks later, she asked me to write a column about how it’s wrong to say “I graduated college” instead of “I graduated from college.” It’s not. Both are acceptable. I told her so. Soon after, she mentioned the terrible mistake people make when they used “robbed” in place of “burglarized.” I told her, with a “Don’t shoot the messenger shrug,” that too is okay. I cited dictionaries. I cited usage guides. I talked about how style guide rules are not universal rules. But she was having none of it.

There’s been a distinct chill in the air on the fifth floor ever since.

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