Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun & Spite - June Casagrande
Very few of us feel that we know enough about grammar. Consequently, we feel insecure and incompetent in speaking and writing. This is magnified when in the presence of "grammar snobs" - those who use their alleged knowledge of grammar to humiliate others. (June argues that we must distinguish between "grammar snobs" and "word nerds," who simply enjoy language.) June has written this book to encourage those of us who feel less than adequate in our speaking and writing skills. She proves that, more often than not, the so-called rules that grammar snobs claim to exhaustively know are either untrue, or contradicted by other style manuals and word usage books. In other words, the rules of grammar are not as neat and nice as grammar snobs would have us think. There is major disagreement about many rules. For example, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" is not grammatically wrong. It is ok to split infinitives. And besides, "to boldly go" sounds a lot better than "to go boldly." Another example: It is ok to end a sentence with a preposition. There is no rule against it. June quotes Garner's Modern American Usage: "The spurious rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a remnant of Latin grammar, in which a preposition was the one word that a writer could not end a sentence with" (23). Should one punctuate "do's and don't's," do's and don'ts," or "dos and don'ts"? (First: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Second: Webster's New World College Dictionary and Third: The Chicago Manual of Style. Is it "Jesus's friend" or "Jesus' friend"? Should it be "red, white, and blue" or "red, white, and blue"? It is "16" or "sixteen"? Do you like music from "the '80s" or "the 80's" or "the 80s"? June's goal is that her readers would be a little less intimated by the meanies. One need not be a member of a super-exclusive clique in order to speak and write. Grammar and punctuation are relatively simple with a few confusing gray areas, but we should not allow these gray areas to keep us from communicating. June's humor makes learning fun. She is bright, witty, and a tad risque. She has great fun explaining the difference between "lay" and "lie." "'To lie' is something I do to myself. 'To lay' is something I do to something - or, ahem, someone - else" (18). Lay is inflected as lay-laid-laid. Lie is inflected as lie-lay-lain. (Note that much confusion arises from the fact that the past tense of lie is lay.)