Category: Grammar Nazism

I think it was William F. Suckley who characterized conservatives (people who want to conserve what’s right and what worked well in the past) as someone standing athwort the Tide of history, shouting “Pop!”

Imagine if you were Horace standing proud at the bridge outside Home, trying single-handedly to stop the Geordies from crossing a bridge so that the defenders could use the time to mount a fence — only to discover that instead of doing that, the inhabitants of Gnome were having a party and putting lipstick on their wives, sisters, daughters and preteen sons so that they’d be more attractive to the invaders.

Well, that’s how I feel in my struggle to preserve grammar standards nowadays.  What’s the point of running over a speed bump and complaining about how much it affects your reading pleasure, when the people who let the speed bumps fall off the back of the truck a) don’t care and b) are too busy heading off to their next big adventure of launching a podcast or showing their tits on Tuk Tuk to worry about some old geyser mouthing off about their shitty speling?

Even better when the Artificial so-called Intelligence can write a better sentence than the aforementioned scribes anyway, so they don’t have to bother creating anything at all?

There’s no point in trying to make the written word, you know, comprehensible when all your efforts are greeted with indifference or worse, a patronizing pat on the head with “There, there, Gramps.  Go take a pill and listen to your old unremastered non-autotuned Beetles songs.”  (unspoken:  just kill yourself you old fart, because why would you waste your time on such irrelevant activity when you could be a “content creator” on Instagram which you don’t subscribe to anyway.)

So that’s it:  I quit.  No more speed bump posts, no more kvetching about spelling errors, illiteracy, ahistorical writing or any of the multitude of sins which have infected modern writing like a malignant tumor.

I’m going back to the old standards:  guns, cars, booze, women and political rants, in no specific order of preference.  And if in my reading I encounter godawful spelling errors, dangling participles and misplaced commas (to name but a few), I’ll just ignore them and carry on — because that seems to be the current way of doing things.  Standards?  Who needs them?

And who am I to be the one not keeping up with modernity and trends?

So, for the last time:

…for me, according to the Z-Man:

One of the things that comes with writing for a public audience in the digital age is the editor without portfolio. This is the person who roams the internet looking for spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, and grammar issues. There are many of these people, as the comment section of every internet post has at least one comment about a typo or alleged improper word choice. They are like the samurai without a master in feudal Japan, except they wield the blue pencil instead of a sword.

That would be me, and people like me.

But our days are numbered (according to the Prophet Z):

The grammar police have drained a lot of the life from the written word, and AI will help them bleed it white. In time, most people will rely on AI to write their text, and that means it will narrow to the point where most writing reads like the user manual for your toaster.

The main loser in the AI revolution will be the grammar ronin. Soon, they will not be able to find text that violates their interpretation of Strunk and White. If they persist, the robots producing the text will simply disconnect them from the internet, leaving them to roam the countryside with a blue pencil in search of bits of paper to edit. The era of the grammar ronin is coming to an end. He will be defeated by the thing that made him possible at the dawn of the internet: technology.

This is like saying that music critics will be out of a job because of AutoTune — the bland pablum of AutoTune is little different from A.I.-smoothed prose, after all.

And here’s where the Z-bloke makes his mistake.  I very rarely, if ever, go after some tit’s moronic spelling or obtuse grammar mistakes because I can’t fault their argument.  There may be people like that, but I ain’t one of them.

I go after the SpellChek Generation because they, and their alleged editors, are fucking clueless about the essence of communication and its absolute need for clarity and meaning.  Far from “drain[ing] a lot of the life from the written word”, I’m attempting to keep the railway of communication smooth so that the reader’s comprehension isn’t derailed  by the bent steel of crappy spelling and diverted by the careless switches thrown by obfuscatory / obtuse grammar (if I may be permitted the use of such an antiquated metaphor).  Some people, mostly the stupid ones, are not distracted by horrible grammar and silly spelling — I am not one of those, and I stand proudly thereto.

But never fear, O Z-Master;  if I lose my job as grammar ronin / Nazi, I’m sure that unlike the actual ronin — whose lives were rendered pointless by the disappearance of their samurai lords — I’ll have no problem finding something equally stupid on which to vent my irritation.

This is Grammar Nazi, signing off.

Seen on Twatter recently:

The problem is that our system has a crisis of legitimacy.

ex-President Applesauce illegally and deliberately imported somewhere between 10mm and 20mm illegal aliens into the USA and illegally provided them with tax dollars you and I earned on the sweat of our brows.

I’m not taking issue with the argument, as always, but I am taking issue with its presentation.

This abbreviation of millions and thousands has always been problematic for me.  The problem, as usual, starts with the Romans and their poxy language, while their stupid numbering system also comes into play.

Latin for 1,000:  mille (M).  So 2,000 (e.g. in dates):  MM.

Unfortunately, when we try to make the M into a million, we have to multiply the Ms into MM.  See the problem?  While numerically it makes sense (1 millimeter = one-thousandth of a metre = 1mm), linguistically we get into all sorts of trouble because when we try to abbreviate millions, as above, the appearance of, say, 20 million (20mm) comes out as 20 millimeters because it’s what we’re used to seeing, thanks to the equally-poxy metric system.

Frankly, we can overcome all confusion by not using abbreviations altogether, i.e. writing “10 million to 20 million”, or even “10-20 million” (inferior, but almost acceptable) instead of “10mm-20mm”.

Mixing Latin with metric is where we all fall over, by the way, because in the metric usage, “m” is also the abbreviation for “metre”, e.g. “Olympic 100m sprint”.  Some have tried to compensate by capitalizing the “m” when you need to express “thousand”, but that muddies the literary reading even more.

Lastly, a free box of .22 ammo goes to the Reader who can first explain to me what “milliard” officially means.