Grammer

My obsession with correcting others' grammatical errors began in a small classroom. It was seventh grade English and I hated it. We had paper back books that served as work/text books. While most of my classmates used their books for assignments, I used mine for practicing signing my name, listing all of my friends and drawing random animals, flowers and swirlys. I was a doodler.

This particular class was terrible. It was immediately after lunch so we were all fighting off the afternoon slump and trying our best to pay attention to our teacher explain prepositional phrases and gerunds. Gerunds? I don't even know what that word means anymore.

The only thing that kept us awake was the sporadic gas episodes of a fellow classmate. He would eat bean and cheese quesadillas EVERY SINGLE DAY for lunch. While we were all doing everything we could to stay awake, he was over in the corner gassing all of us. We would break out into fits of laughter and shake violently. Half of us were beet red and the other half was doubled over. It was disgusting, but thinking back on that muggy classroom makes me chuckle every time.

We never had the heart to tell the teacher what we were laughing at because we didn't want to hurt his feelings. We suffered through it for better or worse. Oh, how I lived for pizza day. He loved pizza so we were all spared the first and third fridays of the month.

God bless Pizza Hut. Amen.

Anyway, I became addicted to correcting grammar after that point. To this day, I can her someone say "I'm doing good," or, "I ain't never seen that before" from a mile away. Call me a snob or know it all if you will, but I just can't help myself.

The other day after a particularly long day at work, I was driving home when a sign caught my attention. It was for a new store downtown advertising affordable fashions.

"Fashion with flair at prices you can bare."

Bare? Unless we're undressing the prices, I'm guessing someone didn't run that slogan through a word processor.

I do love my small town and the local dialect does come with its own unique set of grammatical allowances and quirks. The locals can keep their double negatives.

I'll just keep fighting the good fight.

Nothing's worser than bad grammer, after all.