Can We Talk 2

Good Grammar or Pretend You Don't Notice

         Unfortunately, I am in the lower level of a word and grammar snobbery. Upper level would be like Frazier Crane, extremely annoying. I call it unfortunate because I hear errors and it's like scraping nails on the chalkboard in my mind.Long ago learned to keep my mouth shut. A haughty speech professor told us that it was rude to correct someone's grammar. So I have tried to refrain.

         But that backfires, too, when someone who doesn't mind being rude, says, "Oh, you were an English major and you didn't catch his mistake! Ha ha!" I did catch it, but I ignored it. Now I'm biting my lip while while smiling at you.

         Things like split infinitives or the wrong use of pronouns as objects of prepositions get under my skin. And they're prolific in business writing, even highly paid copy writing. Try telling the higher ups in the company they're making themselves look foolish and uneducated. No, they can't make mistakes. If they say it incorrectly, then it will be considered correct.

         Some words are just wrong in popular usage. Like in cooking, a stalk of celery is the whole bunch with one common base. An individual piece is not a stalk, but a rib. Who talks about eating a rib of celery on a diet? And a clove of garlic varies inside. A bulb of garlic is the whole root vegetable, made up of many cloves. You can't tell whether there will be tiny cloves or huge cloves, or dried up and withered cloves until you peel away the paper skins and separate them. You think you're getting one medium clove and it turns out to be several smaller ones with a common paper skin. So if you're cooking and the recipe calls for a clove, you need to make a judgment call about whether you need only half or several to get one medium clove. (You might overdo the garlic, but it hardly ever ruins a recipe.)