The Road Less Respected

I see a lot of misspellings, grammar, and usage errors on Internet (frequently mine), and while I may cringe and wish to correct them, I don't. No one likes the Grammar Nazis, and I'm all about being liked.

I do mention these things, though, when I'm asked to comment on someone's writing or when I think someone might be interested in bettering their writing, but I have no idea if I'm at all helpful. I don't know all the rules and make tons of mistakes on my own, but that doesn't stop me from harshly judging people who confuse lose and loose or confuse comparatives (less and fewer, number and amount).

I don't know exactly why, but I hate reading "amount of humans" or "less bodies" when humans are, in fact, countable and not measured and should take the other word. I use the distinction to separate writers into those who make me glow with pleasure and those who disappoint me, but they rarely know this.

People, of which I am one, often get all persnickity when they're corrected, hence the Grammar Nazi response. What's interesting in all this, I find, is that when it comes to hard science or factual areas, people are free to correct errors. There's a distinction between correcting someone's mistake in the number of DNA genes and their saying there are less of them than another species, and I find that odd.

We usually let people tell us we're wrong when they correct us on scientific matters, but can get all huffy and dismissive when we correct their English. To me, the two are very similar in that they're both mistakes, but most people exhalt the sciences. Or, demean the humanitarian.

Grammatical errors are considered secondary, less important, more frivilous, and a whole bunch of things like that, and I find that curious. I wonder why. It may very well be that they are, but I find it something to wonder about.

A woman who grew up in France once told me that, as school children, kids who made mistakes in French would be teased and laughed at. I'm not sure that happens with English, not in America, so it may be as much a cultural thing as anything else. It's true, I think, that in America we worship science and technology, but I'm not sure why that means demoting everything else. It may be that English has too many confusing rules, or that they're not as cut and dried, or else we just don't like feeling like we're being picked on.

Unless, of course, what we're being picked on is something cold and definitive, like 14.7