grammatically correct

Thanks for noticing, 'fly. I had an eighth grade English teacher who embarrassed several students in the class when they commented they were "nauseous." Perhaps not many people care about the distinction any more.

(I also am very tuned into the difference in meaning between "imply" and "infer," thanks in part to years of reading Nero Wolfe mysteries.

I guess I'm overly affected by things I read - as a child, I was kind of haunted by the fairy tales where the protagonist met an old woman in the woods, and how they treated that old woman affected the rest of their life...for example, the girl who opened up her lunch basket and offered to share was given an enchantment that made diamonds and rubies fall out of her mouth when she spoke, but the girl who was rude to the old lady got an enchantment where she got toads and lizards.

I'm sure the symbolism there is not so blatant as I interpreted it as a child - that it's something more like, "once a kind person, always a kind person." But I always was very careful to look out for old women when I was out playing.

At any rate...a little later on [and probably too late in my life to be given to this kind of fantasy], reading the Nero Wolfe novels, I envisioned myself being summoned to an office, where a large man behind a desk begins interrogating me, and he eventually asks, "Would you use 'infer' and 'imply' interchangeably?" And I would look at him, and my eyes would get large with surprise, and I would say, "No...no...they are two totally different words. Infer is when you draw a conclusion from what someone says; imply is when you say something and try to get someone to draw that conclusion." And I'd sit back, feeling a certain relief that I had passed some kind of test.

I will also admit a certain reluctance to use "contact" as a verb, as a result of my Wolfean reading.)

Other grammatical things that bother me:

the less/fewer distinction. Or rather, the lack-of. "Less" is when you're talking about a quantity that cannot be counted as distinct units: "less" time; "less" water. "Fewer" is when the individual objects can be counted: "fewer" students; "fewer" trees. I suppose because we have one word on the other side - "more" - that stands in for both quantity and number, people get sloppy.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not a complete pedant. I don't stop and correct people (except when grading a student's written paper; I do think that's right and good). But I cringe a little.

Also the "me/I" thing. This is where someone is using themselves as the object of a sentence and they use the wrong pronoun. Now, English doesn't really have noun cases any more (like German does), but the pronouns still fit the old case-pattern. But most people don't know that.

I was taught - if you're saying, for example, "Sally and I" or "Sally and me," drop the "Sally and" and see which one "sounds right." (I learned precious little formal grammar in school but I am fortunate in that I seem to have a natural knack for the "sounds right").

For example: "Sally and I went to the inn." That's correct; you would say, "I went to the inn." "Sally and me went to the inn" would be wrong; you wouldn't say "Me went to the inn" (At least, unless you're Cookie Monster.)

The bigger problem comes with...(and this is where I admit some ignorance) you are the (in)direct object of the sentence (my ignorance being that I can't at the moment remember if it is the direct or indirect object). "The car belongs to my brother and me." An awful lot of people would say "The car belongs to my brother and I."

(Again: "The car belongs to me" sounds right; "The car belongs to I" is clearly wrong. Just take out the "my brother and" to figure it out, as my seventh or eighth grade English teacher told us)

(Side joke: in my family we have a running joke that Disciples of Christ ministers cannot make the I/me distinction in sentences like that. Every single one we've ever met messed it up at least occasionally. In fact, the minister of the church I belong to now - who used to be in another denomination and "converted" to DOC - has started doing it!)

That one actually doesn't bother me so much; it doesn't grate on my nerves like the following ones:

And these are mostly in written language; in spoken language you can't "hear" them.

The "your/you're" messup. "You're" is short for "you are."

The "their/there/they're" messup. Again, same thing. I mostly see people using "there" when they should use "their."

(Are kids not taught the concept of possessive pronouns in school any more? I might mess up occassionally when typing fast -like on a blogpost - but in my 'serious' writing, like exams and papers and reports, I make jolly sure that I've got the right forms).

The "its/it's" messup. This one I can kind of forgive because it's tricky. This is one case where it LOOKS like the possessive (which we typically make in English with 's) should be the "it's" form, but "it's" is really "it is." (I keep threatening to get a stamp made up that says, "Its is the posessive; it's is short for 'it is'" and use it on student papers so I don't keep having to write that out.

That said: not too far from me there used to be a sign for a softball complex that had on its advertisement: "Softball At It's Best!"

I tend to think if you're putting out a commercially-made sign, you better damn well make sure it's right. That thing grated on me every time I drove by it.

The apostrophe-makes-plural! messup.

It is not "more than one flower is flower's." I'm actually surprised how often I see this. It's mostly, it seems, misused in commercial applications. Like, "Bagel's!"

I always want to be snarky and ask "What does the bagel own?" But I don't.

Bob the Angry Flower has a short guide to correct usage. (I wish Bob would also take on the it's/its thing.)

(I love Bob's reaction to the mistake: "NO! Wrong! Totally wrong! Where'd you learn this? Stop doing it!")

I CARE about grammar - I may not "formally" know much (I could not diagram a sentence to save my life; by the time I hit middle school sentence-diagramming was apparently on the Blacklist of Educational Practices), but I have a good "native knowledge" of how things work - which came in part from learning French in high school (where we were expected to know direct objects and indirect objects) and from reading writers who use good grammar.

I know, there are a lot of people who roll their eyes over my finicky attitude, who say, "What does it matter? Language evolves!" But I would argue that you need to be able to communicate, and not just communicate with your little coterie. And that there IS such a thing as "proper English," and it does not make it somehow oppressive or racist that it is not the English you speak with your friends.

(And that said? I'll be d****d before I will learn text-message-speak. The day when a student tells me he should have the right to hand in a paper written in "textspeak" is the day I reconsider my career as an educator.)