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Blog Fodder #11

February 15, 2007 By Jenny Ryan 7 Comments

Which is worse? Poor manners or poor grammar? Why?

OK, first of all I must tell you that my initial reaction to this question was TOTALLY that of a girl, meaning, “If I were going to gossip about someone who was committing one or the other of these faux pas, which one would get the most reaction out of my fellow magpies?”

And I must also tell you that, from my own personal experience, it’s pretty easy to get a reaction to a statement like, “Oh my gosh, can you BELIEVE that he just referred to his wife as ‘my servant’ in front of all their friends?!”*

But when you are on vacation at the beach and you flounce into your hotel room in regally high moral indignation and announce to your husband that in no way, under any circumstances whatsoever, will you condescend to eat at the “Western Sizzlin” because its name is composed entirely of adjectives and contains no proper nouns whatsoever (if you can even comprehend such an abominable travesty against grammar), well in that case you’re pretty much on your own. (Fortunately for him, he’d packed A Lot of tequila.)

But you see, this is where the danger lies-this is the top of a very slippery slope. Because just about everyone has at least some sense of what is and what isn’t appropriate behavior. But what no one is talking about are the incalculable examples of violence done EVERY DAY to English grammar.

Like the people who use “myself” as a subject and think that this makes them sound “extra specially edumacated”:

-“John and myself attended the meeting”. Really-“Myself attended the meeting”? Did you now? And did they then take the only sensible course of action and FIRE YOUR ASS so that all of the people formerly at the mercy of the barrage of your constant verbal and written assaults could finally be put out of their misery?

Or the people who use the subject “I” as the object of a preposition, and think they are being SO MUCH SMARTER than the rest of us peasants who couldn’t correctly conjugate a verb if it knocked us down in the street and then sat on our head:

-“They presented the report to Todd and I”. Really-“They presented the report to I“? And did it say, “Could you please learn a freakin’ grammar rule once in a while?!” Or at least sound out your sentences to see whether or not they make sense?

-Also bad: “They presented the report to Todd and myself.” Really? In that case, I have no choice but to smite you with my Condescending And Inappropriately Superior Attitude Of Someone Who Actually Knows How To Use Reflexive Pronouns. I’m sure you will now feel suitable chastened.

It can be very lonely at times, this walking the path of a Grammar Snob. But that is a price I’m willing to pay. Even if it occasionally means floating up from the brink of a nitrous-induced coma to inform my dentist (who incidentally is just about to poke me with The Smokin’ Hot Drill Of ‘Thank God For Novocaine Because Otherwise This Would Really Hurt’) that the saying actually describes “killing multiple birds with one stone”, not throwing multiple stones at one bird. (Because I may be Book Smart, but sometimes I’m Life Dumb.)

*This actually happened. (Not to me.)
**Man, can I work myself up into an absolute rant about nothing or what?! I’m good.

Filed Under: Memes ("Me! Me!s") Tagged With: blog fodder, blog memes, grammar rules, grammar snob

Apparently, My Powers Have Some Limits

September 17, 2006 By Jenny Ryan 11 Comments

Because today, I broke my website. And you know what did me in? Pride.

Last week I took a quiz to determine just exactly where I fell among all of the deadly sins, and here were my results:

Greed: High
Gluttony: High
Wrath: Medium
Sloth: Medium
Envy: Medium
Lust: Very Low
Pride: Very High

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

This will of course come as no surprise to anyone who is married to me, is related to me, went to school with me, is friends with me, was friends with me, has ever worked with me, or has ever passed by me on the street.

And if there is anything about which I am prideful, it is the correct use of grammar, and my own personal correct-grammar-using-abilities. In other words, I am a Grammar Snob.

Just two weeks ago on vacation (VACATION!) I declared to my husband that I could not bring myself to eat at the Western Sizzlin’ because its name is composed entirely of adjectives and contains no nouns. (Fortunately for him, he packed lots of tequila.)

So today I asked him to install a new plug in on my blog that would change the way that the comments appear on each post. He did, and everything was fine until I saw that for some reason, it generated the following sentences: “[x] and [y] have already leave comments. Why don’ you?”

Well, there’s not enough tequila in the world to make that acceptable to a grammar snob, so I took it upon myself to just go in and “correct” the grammar written in the HTML code. Because everyone knows that having a Master’s Degree in Spanish and being able to write beautiful, densely packed, grammatically correct paragraphs in two languages means that you are also an expert in computer code.

Not.

Fortunately my husband, the person who actually knows how to write computer code and who has pretty much built this entire website for me, was able to fix it, with only a minimum of eye-rolling, whistling, and use of the phrase “screwed the pooch.”

And because he loves me very very much, and because there is some tequila left over from vacation, he also fixed the grammar for me too.

Filed Under: All About Me, The Naked Truth, Using My Powers Tagged With: grammar, grammar snob

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