Are you a grammar bully?

[andrewducker]

Do you, when seeing a grammatical mistake in someone's informal writing, which doesn't cloud the clarity in any way, feel the need to leap in and make it all about you, by correcting it?

Do you feel the need to do so even when people are not making mistaked at all, but simply making stylistic choices which would have offended your English teacher back in the dark ages?

Then, frankly, you can go back to your own Facebook/Journal/Blog/Whatever, and rant about The Youth Of Today _there_.l

Because that kind of behaviour gets in the way of proper discussion of what the person was talking about.* It turns it into a discussion of a piddling side-point which is almost certainly utterly irrelevant to the point they wished to discuss.

What it effectively does is say "When I was young, I had this set of rules beaten into me so much that I twitch whenever I see someone break them. And so I am now going to beat them into you." It's derailing, it's bullying, and it's the kind of behaviour up with with which I will not put**.

So, from this point onwards, I'm going to delete comments on this journal (and on FB, where I already made this announcement) which do this***.

(Exception: This post. Feel free to argue about it in the comments.)


*Unless, of course, said discussion is _about_ grammar, in which case feel free to let loose.
**Yes, I know that Churchill didn't say that
***To quote ciphergoth "There'll be a lot less comments like that by the time you've finished."

Comments

[miss_s_b]

"which doesn't cloud the clarity in any way" is the salient point there, I think.

[heyokish]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlhKWeDWMA

[matgb]

Well said sir, well said.

And if I didn't find Feersum Endjinn impossible to read, I'd say the same about spelling purists as well ;-)

[redbird]

Elsenet, I am very deliberately not even opening a thread on "grammar mistakes that make you twitch," because I know that either I would hit things that do make me twitch, or start getting annoyed at the people who are posting there, for either defending rules that aren't, or the level of upset they get about it.

Because yes, some of this makes me twitch. That is either my issue to deal with, or a potentially relevant job skill, since sometimes people pay me to worry about punctuation, noun/verb agreement, and so on.

[andrewducker]

It took me a while to get into Feersum Endjinn. But then the same was true of Trainspotting :->

[matgb]

I've never read the book, always meant to, but had zero problem with the film (well, except the scene where Spud's being deliberately OTT). I keep meaning to get hold of it to give it a go but that's true of a lot of books.

[dalglir]

Stephen Fry says it more eloquently than me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY&sns=em

[andrewducker]

Stephen Fry is awesome.

Really looking forward to seeing him in Hobbit 2: Hobbit Harder.

[azurelunatic]

These days I only tend to do that if they started it. I very fondly remember being finally allowed to use both barrels on a friend's horrible abusive ex who took deep pride in his writing (but wasn't very good at it); I stayed calm and used red text as he descended into frothing incoherence.

Aside from counter-bullying someone who was legitimately asking for it, I've been taught to always say something nice if I'm pointing out a problem. If I think it's likely that someone would want to hear about a mistake, I leave it in two comments -- one which explicitly assumes it was a typo and has nothing else of import so if they want to make it go away they can without losing anything else -- and the other one engaging helpfully with the content.

[cheekbones3]

"...a lot fewer comments..."

lolz

Have similar comments already been deleted from this thread?

I fully agree by the way, and am just being dead funny, as ever.

[andrewducker]

I don't think I deleted any comments from here. People were pretty reasonable.

And nobody has violated the commandment yet!