True Confessions of a Grammar Snob

For as long as I can remember, grammar mistakes (including my own) have registered with me, just as dissonant chords would. They are certainly not limited to the uneducated – I have heard rabbis, published authors, and plenty of others in high positions say things that set my grammar radar on high alert.

When we learned about subjects and objects in the fourth grade, grammar started to make sense to me. And even though a response of “This is she” to the question “May I speak to Ms. ____” sounded ridiculous, I could understand why it was correct. However, this stilted use of the word “she” is the very lesson that caused the most common grammar mistake that I hear today:

Which statements are grammatically correct?

(1) Jane gave the book to Ellen and I.
(2) Jane gave the book to Ellen and me.
(3) Jane gave the book to her and me.
(4) Jane gave the book to she and I.

The middle two are correct, although there are many people out there who use the first one in particular all the time. You can figure it out by breaking the sentence into smaller pieces and realizing that the only things that sound right are “to Ellen”, “to her”, and “to me”.

After my friend FL spent one semester at Vassar, she came back to our small town in the Deep South and informed us that our iced tea was no long “real good”, but rather that it was “really good.” Our teachers had spent so much energy trying to convince children to give up on “ain’t” that they had skipped over some of the finer things like adverbs. I still make this mistake sometimes, but I think of FL every time I do.

I’m not such a purist that I am offended when I hear a mistake. My immediate family will tease each other about mistakes. They especially love to jump on mine. My husband and I are of such a like craziness about this that during a lecture our eyebrows both go up at the same time when the speaker makes a grammar mistake.

This all starts to sound like a bunch of hooey when you consider that the goal is communication – making yourself understood. And whether you use the subjective or objective form of a pronoun is not at all important if the message comes across. In fact, there are times when the intent conveys the correct meaning when we don’t use the right words at all.

So this grammar thing is simply a game that lets me think about words, that lets me diagram sentences in my head, that tests this language which has more exceptions than rules. But for the most part grammar itself had no exceptions, just occasional mistakes.

Are you a grammar snob? Or have you learned to focus on the intent?