Thanks in advance,
DG

P.S.: Fuck dat spider!

I can never decide to laugh or cry when I see the signs at the grocer’s for “Fresh Meat” , though my favorite by far is at the checkout area where customers are warned that All Merchandise Must Be “Paid-For” Before Leaving the Store.

While I find myself deeply cognizant of your considered arguments, I humbly submit to you that I cannot in good conscience agree. English, like every other tongue that Man has created, has both a codified (though frequently and at length debated in the literature) set of written norms and prescriptions as well as a collquial vulgate rife with errors and malapropisms. And yet, many of the flowers of our literary canon have arisen from the sullied soil of the spoken language.

Are not the mellifluous Romance languages themselves the product of gradual deliquescence from the Latin? By what unprecendented contemporary privilege are we, as consumers of English in but a miniscule portion of the mother tongue’s storied history, assigned the role of ultimate arbiters of prescriptive usage? I, for one, an unwilling to assume the mantle of the Academy for hundreds of millions of my fellow English speakers.

I’m sorry. I’m just fucking with you because I have a big report due that I don’t want to write. Believe me, correct grammar is not the hill that blog credibility will die on.

Also, as achingly well-intentioned as lexical pedantry can be, you’re still going to get called a dick when you offer unsolicited corrections of another’s speech or writing.

I am warming to DT, which is not unrelated to the fact that I am married to a woman who is incensed by signs at the supermarket which read “10 items or less.” “Fewer, dammit,” she mutters, knowing full well she’s promoting a lost cause, but adamant that someone rages against the dying of the grammatical night.

It’s kind of a dick move to point errors out in informal situations. Unless they use “whom” incorrectly. My view is, if you’re pretentious enough to use “whom” in spoken English and you use it wrong, you deserve to get called out for it.

(Oh, who are we kidding. Yes, yes we would.)

One thing Orson, here’s where he came off to me as being at least a little contrite…because my guess is a pompous ass like Buzz would’ve nailed you on this if given the chance, but perhaps it even escaped the all-knowing genius from the old guard:

“SH: But there’s also humor blogs. There’s a lot of humor blogs out there that are really only accountable to being funny. And if they’re funny, then people will read them, and if they’re not funny, then people won’t read them.”

You’ve gotta get your is/are verb agreement straight there…You worked it out by the end, but I think you mean “…there ARE also humor blogs. There ARE a lot of humor blogs out there…”
This is really nit-picky, I know…and a very, very, common mistake that I see and hear in all forms of media daily. But it’s just constructive criticism. I’m certainly not above making a grammatical error (or twenty) myself…but I’m not the one going toe-to-toe with Mr. “I cut my teeth with Woodward and Bernstein”. This is an area that many blogs get tripped up on, common mistakes of grammar that have become so common that they’ve even grown to routinely infect the office of our fair president. I love EDSBS and consider you a great wordsmith and writer…and it’s my personal opinion that “that’s what editors are for”. But in the event that you’re serving as your own editor…I’m just saying, the Queens English has been long overlooked by many in the blogosphere–perhaps a stricter adherence would help claims of legitimacy in matters such as this.