“Oh dear”, admonished Madame Persnickety, with a supercilious sneer: “That’s not JUST non-standard English, it IS complete and utter, savage colloquialism.” Stick a pencil behind your ear, position yourself in a James Dean stance, by folding your arms across your chest, and diplomatically demand: “Tell me the rule I have broken your ladyship?” I’ve refused to capitalize the “L” in protest, that may or may not be entirely due to my intent of a grammar revolt.
Firstly, if Prudence Persnickety began using a phrase and it caught on, everyone else would be using it. Take for example, “currying favor.” It’s “currying Favel”, from a French poem about a horse. “For all intents and purposes,” not, “all intensive purposes”; “A damp squib”, not “squid”.
If all the people made the same mistake, it could come to
take root in our collective consciousness, sometimes replacing
the original phrases entirely.
If someone was wildly mistaken, would you say they had another thing coming? Well, it’s actually another “think” coming. But, this correct phrase, to most of you, just sounds all kinds of wrong.
These are the sorts of changes that keeps lexicographers
updating their dictionaries so that they reflect how language is
really being used by people, rather than instruct on how
language should be used.
The grammar enforcement, the screiben das Gefangnis, yes, it’s my opinion they could, most likely, be German. What other language can scare the daylights out of you when vocalized by humans in black uniforms wearing monocles? Your punishment, though, will be British – literature that is – the most insipid English prose. Your reading list will consist of three sleep inducing novels – read one-hundred times each - staying awake is imperative: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Marble Faun”; Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”; and, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost. Quizzes on all things Milton will be given for the sole purpose of driving you to ways to plot your escape. Consequently, the guards will apprehend you and throw you into solitary confinement with a bound copy of George Elliot’s “Silas Marner,” along with, copies of: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers; The King’s English; and, The Oxford Style Manual – the guards are, indeed, sadistic.
Good luck on your appeal to the non-existent, invisible
guardians of the grammar penitentiary system.
Their source, conveniently, is never revealed. They know what’s wrong but they will never tell you how they know – as if they have the only copy, in existence, of the “Grammar Penal Code” and you don’t, so you will forever be at their mercy.
Be careful what you write in your petition and how you
write it because every word you pen or speak, will put you in
danger of an extended sentence or, re-incarceration for breaking
a rule you never knew even existed.
However, there is hope, if enough people commit the same
grammar infraction, yours might end up in the dictionary -
paradoxically confusing, isn’t it? The grammar law universe can
reverse itself.
If, by chance, you do manage to get released from grammar detention, as you exit the gargantuan, iron doors, peer upwards and pay attention to the inscription to your left: “Caesar non supra grammaticos.” After gathering your meager belongings, you should, timidly, ask the release guardian what that quote means? She, most likely, will pull her monocle further down on her nose, contorting her mouth into a smug sneer and reply, in contemptuous condescension, “The Emperor is not above the grammarians.”
You hang your head and affect an obsequious mannerism – oh
hell, you become a complete sycophant, realizing that
grammarians surely have taken themselves way too seriously. They
not only produced imperative, language usage demands, on mere,
lowly writers like you and me, but on one of the most notable
Emperors of Rome - they be bad. You WILL go forth and continue
to anguish about whether you had dangled a participle or split
an infinitive because the Grammar Ponzi Police still wields the authority to batter ram your mind and force entry into you writing with all intents and purposes of making your writing so much better that you will earn enough money and fame to break their rules without risking arrest.
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