In a more innocent time, angry Denver Post readers would telephone the city desk to point out lapses in grammar, local history or other signs of ineptitude that should not have appeared in print.
There hasn’t been as much of that fussiness in recent years. It may be that mistakes have become so pervasive the fastidious have decided it’s futile to fight a flood with their meager sponges.
But they are still out there, waiting to rise up in righteous indignation at any indication that someone else cares – someone like the Grammar Grump.
A column two weeks ago about grammatical sloppiness released a pent-up response that was more than 10 times the usual number of e-mails I receive about a column. More people care about linguistic lapses than political shenanigans.
Several were along these lines: “Praises! Hallelujah! What can I say? EVERYTHING you said is absolutely right. I get so tired of extraneous apostrophes, twisted wording to avoid gender-specific words, and everything else you mention.”
That reader, and others, had additional peeves, too many to list them all here. One was the “is-is” construction favored “by people who seem to think that somehow they overlooked in English class the rule that the word “is” must always be used in pairs.” It’s often heard in sports broadcasts: “The problem is, is he got sacked on that last play.”
Another common complaint was improper use of I, me or myself. Martha Elliott blamed the “pervasive misuse” of the reflexive pronoun “myself” on a confused attempt “to cover the lack of understanding of the nominative and subjective “I” and ‘me.”‘
It’s related to the fear of “me.” People will not use “me” in combination with another pronoun even when it’s proper. Woody Paige had it right, in his farewell column last Sunday, when he referred to all the things “you and I” have enjoyed together over the years. But that same phrase didn’t belong in the headline: “Time has come for you and I to turn the Paige.” In that case, it’s “me,” not “I.”
Here’s an easy way to get it right: Ignore the first of the paired pronouns. One would never say “the time has come for I to move on.”
Of course, sometimes it’s correct to use “myself” or “himself.” That other Denver paper last week had a bad example: “‘We don’t have a recent photo,” Thompson said of he and Lowe.” He didn’t say that about “he”; he said it about “himself.”
E-mailer Mlaurin described these as “affectations by people who must think such wording makes them sound very erudite, when it actually has exactly the opposite effect.”
But wait, as they say on those annoying commercials, there’s more. There’s plenty of unrest among the grammatically grumpy, and there is no shortage of bad examples.
Pronunciation is an irksome thing. Readers complained about “definely” replacing “definitely,” “unfortunely” for “unfortunately,” “tempAture” instead of “tempERAture” or “litAture” for “litERAture.” And have you ever noticed how often, on television, skiers go to “Vel” and criminals go to “jell”?
Mike Hayes is shaken by reporters’ incorrect use of “epicenter.” The word should refer only to earthquakes, he says. The extra syllables, though, seem to give “center” extra emphasis. A similar offense is the use of “penultimate.” It doesn’t mean something more than ultimate; it means next to last.
“With the Internet, everybody’s an author but nobody’s an editor,” wrote Dave Bishop of Aurora. “The same mistake can be replicated hundreds and thousands of times in forwarded e-mail, blogs and interactive chat rooms, where the most-enforced rule is ‘Do not criticize other people’s spelling or grammar.”‘
Yet he was one of two writers who pointed out a mistake. The snooty Grammar Grump ridiculed the improper use of “apostrophes for possessives” when he intended to write “apostrophes for plurals.”
“People should use apostrophes for possessives, but not for plurals,” wrote Michelle Maani, who called herself “another grammar grump.”
Of course. How obvious. How embarrassing.
(Editors’ note: We’re embarrassed, too.)
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
