Nov. 28: Grammar Nazi

I guess I should just come out and admit it: I’m a real Grammar Nazi. I know, I know. Annoying. But I can’t help it! When I get an e-mail from someone and the commas are all over the place, when I see someone using ‘your’ when they should be using ‘you’re,’ I just get so angry. Really, they should round up all these grammar offenders and ship them off to labor camps, subject them to dehumanizing conditions, and finally execute them with poison gas and dump their bodies in a mass grave.

Is this an urge I’m happy to have? No. Of course not. But then, there is something to be said for upholding certain standards. Someone has to look out for grammar, especially in this age of breezy on-the-go texting and emoticons. If we’re not careful, if we don’t protect grammar from those who would ignore or subvert it, we’ll be reduced to gibbering human garbage indicating our wants and desires by grimacing and pointing with sticks within fifty years.

Grammar rules weren’t created arbitrarily. We have grammar so that communication is standardized, so that we can communicate with one another effectively. Imagine a world where everyone adheres to grammar rules, imagine a world of perfect grammar purity. I think about it all the time. As far as I’m concerned, if camps are what we need to achieve that purity, then camps is what we’ll have. You know?

Gosh, this whole thing probably makes me sound like such a nut. Right now you must be thinking I’m some total lunatic. Trust me when I say I’ve thought about this, and that the camps idea really came as a last resort. At first I thought what might be good is if we were to start with sanctions of some kind, maybe making known grammar offenders wear a mark or a sign, so that regular people would know to avoid them. Maybe there could even be a rule that said grammar offenders could only do business with or marry amongst their own kind, so that they could go on garbling the language without bothering the rest of us. The problem with this plan, though, is that these people are so out of control, so untrustworthy, that they probably wouldn’t abide by the rules. They probably wouldn’t  even understand the rules, because the rules would be presented to them in proper English!

So yeah, much as I hate to admit it, we will probably end up needing those camps. Hard labor until they’re too worn out to be of use, and then a peaceful death by poison gas. Painless, that’s important. We can’t just line them up and shoot them; they are still human beings, after all. I’m a Grammar Nazi, not a Grammar Khmer Rouge. Those people were just savages, hacking each other up with machetes. Horrible.

Yes, it’s sad. And it wouldn’t be a popular policy, at least not at first. But you know, I think once people get used to the idea? Once people get a chance to enjoy a more ordered world, where commas and periods are properly placed, where verb tenses stay nice and consistent? I wouldn’t be surprised if people end up looking at me like some kind of hero.