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Literally the most pedantic post ever.
May 18th, 2008 at 14:35
I’ve got a confession to make, everyone. I think that I’m a Grammar Nazi. Don’t worry, that’s not too much like a real Nazi – if you’ve ever been on the internet, chances are you’ve met a Grammar Nazi. Grammar Nazis are those people on message boards and chat rooms who will complain and discredit you based on whether or not everything is spelt correctly and is grammar perfect, rather than the actual calibre of your argument. I only realised that I was a grammar Nazi when I realised that I was judging people on this criteria.
There are certain grammatical traits that, almost as a reflex action, will suddenly make me switch from a point of respecting someone to actively reviling them.
If you were to misuse the word “random”, my respect for you would drop so rapidly that you could admit to being a card-carrying supporter of Robert Kilroy-Silk and I wouldn’t think any less of you – because it wouldn’t be possible to go any lower. What bothers me is that people – lets be honest here, exclusively teenagers – tend to use the word to describe exclusively non-random things. Run a Google search for “it was totally random” to see what I mean. I think perhaps the only sentence in which the word “random” can be legitimately applied, given the causal nature of events, would be “My random number generator generated me some numbers… they were totally random!” – But for some reason, you never hear teenagers talk about their random number generators.
Talking of “strategy” in situations when there is no “strategy” involved bothers me too – Deal or No Deal being the worst offender as contestants’ talk of their strategy at picking boxes at random (maybe this is the only other acceptable usage of the word ‘random’?). I struggle to watch sport on television for similar reasons, because whenever they interview football players and talk of strategy, as when they say “we’re going to try and get in early and put some goals away and outflank the other team”, or whatever, all I hear is them saying “We’re going to try and score more goals than the opposing team”. This isn’t so much a “strategy” as it is “explaining the rules”.
Its things like this that make me literally fume with anger. Well not ‘literally’ fume- as that’s my third point. I really hate it when people misuse “literally”. This is most toxic when its misused in conjunction with a figure of speech – for example, “I’ve literally just let the cat out of the bag”, would cause me to ask why you were keeping a cat in a bag in the first place.
The horrible and unfortunate thing about misusing “literally” is that I do it – it started when I began deliberately misusing it in conversations for “irony”, but because I’ve done it so often its worked its way into my every day vocabulary – I literally cannot help myself.
Ten points to anyone who picks grammatical errors that I gone done in this post.
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