Thanks to digital technology, inter-personal communication is now more text-based - and this is exciting. Ideas can be expressed more potently. Grammatical innovation can open new avenues of thought. Indeed, this is a fantastic era where everyone has the opportunity to project themselves through aether. This ability - this power - comes with a responsibility. Anyone and everyone can have an earth-shattering idea, but an inability to explain oneself through a competent use of grammar tragically nullifies that idea at the source. Grammar is more than adhering to man-made rules of spelling and punctuation; it is man's attempt to gain some kind of traction in understanding the language mechanism in the humanoid brain. And, by nature, it is flawed and incomplete - that is why language is so exciting and interesting! Specifically, English is one hot mess. Our methodology of verb use is to throw a bunch of words together and, essentially, hope for the best. Yes, because so much semantic meaning is derived from word order English has very little use for morphological inflection. And this is why confusion surfaces when, for example, a verb and a noun are spelled the same way or when pronouns work against themselves.
In this exciting era of open communication through use of text-based communication, some of the more arbitrary grammatical errors are being identified by so-called 'grammar nazis'. Through posts on message boards and feedback forums, these readers rub the error in the writer's face like a puppy that just plopped a steaming load on the living room carpet, and do so with a trite purpose that seems two-fold: 1) to demoralize the writer and 2) to assert their own piddly online presence. No other constructive input is given. Some of the more obvious errors pointed out are all those infamous homophones: There, their, they're, for example. Whoopde-fah-freaking-do. I'd be heard-pressed to believe that any of these grammar nazis would be able to point out a gerundive, or explain modality, or differentiate between active and passive sentences - the more constructive tools of grammar to effectively and convincingly express and argue ideas. Grammar nazis just add to the noise one must sift through to find true content.
The reason English majors may obviously have no jobs is because they.are.everywhere. Just because one cannot see oxygen does not mean the whole world is devoid of it. Likewise, look at how the name of the major and its related occupational title compares to other major and occupational titles:
- I'm a Business major so I can become a businessman
- I'm a Nursing major so I can become a nurse
- I'm a Chemistry major so I can become a chemist
- *I'm an English major so I can become an english
English - and I'll add Linguistic - majors are everywhere. That's the beauty of the study of language: There is no set mold, and, paradoxically, it takes a certain type of person to be one. They move deliberately. They cast a wide net. They can adapt. They are part of the foundation of constructive matters. This meme is misinformed: grammar nazis are not English majors because English majors have more important, constructive shit to do. Now, I recognize that this is a mere meme and it, like all other internet memes, hold little clout. And I shall not furthermore devote much more attention because doing otherwise would be exactly what these grammar nazis would want.
The question I have is this: Do other languages have grammar nazis? If English homophones are among the most damning offenses, what happens with errant gender use in German, or sloppy tense work in Arabic?
