Thursday, May 24, 2012

Arrant Pedantry.

The casual reader of this blog might be tempted to think of me as a neo-conservative linguistic fetishiser. To some extent this is verily so. I don't mind admitting to being a bit of a grammar fascist. Less in the particulars of where the perfect comma should be placed, and more in terms of the readers right to judge the levels of education of the writer, based on spelling mistakes and sentences that are ambiguous or worse still, make no sense whatsoever.

Don't misunderstand me. I am an appallingly lazy speller and can be errantly slapdash when it comes to proof-reading my own work, but I disguise this by the use of computers' spell checker. It's not perfect, but I feel I make some effort.

The reason I make this paltry effort is less-so for the benefit of the reader, and more so to gain a grammarian high ground. I've been on the critical end of people whose grammar fantasies are wrapped up in ritualised sadistic humiliation, and it's not nice. Of those times when I've taken ten-o'-best from an English graduate, I've either been incorrect, and therefore deserving, or haven't armed myself with enough knowledge to defend my, originally correct, statement. Each time I've noted how extraordinarily effective such a distracting line of argument is.

Remember the soundness of an argument might have nothing to do with how well articulated it is and the opposite is true.

"If the glove don't[sic] fit, you must acquit."

There is a modern school of thought that says it doesn't matter how bad your grammar/malapropism as long as your point is understood. This is of course absolutely correct, and I would not be so foolish to argue against it.  But while that is particularly true of the spoken word; mistakes in the written word, like that photo of your groping a buxom coed on a boat in Cancun, just can't be undone.  There's nothing like a strongly worded letter to make ones point and for every error; subtract a righteousness dollar from the argument.

My maternal grandmother would return letters from her children with the mistakes marked and corrected. She had seven children all of whom have excellent English.

Feel free to submit your corrections in the comments section.

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