I've been accused of being a Grammar Nazi. By friends. Now I don't do the whole trolling Facebook posts hoping to find a "your" where a "you're" should reside, commenting with a passively pretentious, "*you're." It is kinda funny seeing others do it, though. With my friends, I guess I was kind of a tyrant. But All I was trying to do is make them aware of their ignorance and help guide them to a more successful future of written exchange. My take was always, especially with the young ones, that one day you will be writing or speaking to someone who's opinion actually matters. And you're going to hit them with this crap? I'm trying to help. That makes me more of a Grammar Pal than anything. If I came over to help them move, would they be all, "Oh look. Here comes the Moving Nazi." I know, it can be pretty shitty. But here's the reason I'm so hung up on it.
Through all of my formative years, I've been told by adults how important proper grammar and diction are. How important cursive was, but that's a whole other thing. I've lived my life thinking that all of this mattered and since becoming an adult I'm constantly shown that it doesn't. "Eh, you know what I meant." I hear that all the time. About a year ago I nearly had a grammatical breakdown when I read an email from an engineer. Not just some schlub in an engineering department mail room, but one of the top dog types that is in charge of projects and stuff. I wish I still had a copy of this. I would totally have shared it with you. Suffice it to say it was riddled with with a buffet, a smorgasbord, a veritable cornucopia of spelling, capitalization, grammatical, and punctuation errors. Why? Why would this hit me so hard, you may or most probably may not be asking. It's because this guy... this fucking guy... he's a top level professional. He is a PRO! How could he get anywhere without being able to conjugate a proper, adult level sentence much less be a professional engineer? I know this sounds like a knock on the guy, but it isn't. He's good people. But it IS a knock on this screwed up, shit system (shytstem?) where you have it drilled into your head how important meaningless things are. And there are sooo many things that I've been told are extremely important, but appear not to really matter at all. The fore mentioned cursive, manners, not littering, self respect, traditions, not having fun at work, hygiene, matching clothes, not being in the way, and many, many more. I guess my biggest question is; If grammar doesn't matter at that high of a level, then when does it?
I've always kinda found the term Grammar Nazi, not so much offensive, but nonsensical. I mean, when you look at the word Nazi, it has a particular meaning. There is so much that goes into the meaning of that one word, it's ridiculously daunting. Now let's look at Grammar Nazi. If I am a Grammar Nazi, are there Grammar Jews? Am I trying to create a superior Grammar race? I guess it's to denote a certain strictness or fanaticism one holds toward whatever given subject the word Nazi is attached to. I see it typically used against people that follow the rules and think everyone else should too. What monsters. Or is it because Hitler's mustache was a hyphen? And of course someone that screws up has to go to the top shelf of insults to make themselves feel better. I think the whole tying Nazi to everything without it making any contextual connection to what Nazi actually means is getting a little played out. What's next, though? Next time someone cuts me off in traffic, should I call them a lane rapist? I'm sure my blogs will be filled with typos. I'm sure people will find them. Eh, you know what I mean.