When I was in the fifth grade, my mother gave me a copy of Catherine Marshall’s book Julie for my birthday.
“You ought to have the book with your name,” she said with a smile.
She’d bought the book at the Cando TruValue Hardware store, which had a wire rack that turned and carried various paperback books on it. I cracked it open that night and read it in a few days.
Over the years, I’ve read it many times, my copy becoming creased and worn. It is a powerful story, but one of the scenes that stands out the most involves the lead character, Julie, who helps her father with a struggling newspaper when she misses a typo in a local advertisement.
I suppose it stuck with me partly because it was a bad word and I was young, but more, I think, because of how it all played out in the story. At first, the store owner was outraged at the typo, but then quickly changed his tune as people began flocking to the store to buy men’s shirts. Eventually, he requested that the “typo” be carried into the next ad and wondered if the ad could also be placed upside down.
It was one of my first encounters with the happenstance of language accidents.
I found that I enjoyed the double meanings of homonyms, accidental typos, and questionable spellings and how they created a kind of poetic trick for the reader who bothered to notice. Instead of fixating on the wrong word or off spelling, it became a game, deciphering what meaning was now construed with this incorrect word or surprise twist of letters. As with people, the faults revealed more of the nature of the world than a perfect facade.
This has carried over, in the same vein, to the “happy accidents” quality I rely upon in my art.
More art than I care to admit has come about by happy accidents, those moments when something spilled, dropped, or I used by mistake. When I let go of the fierce control I insist upon, my brain does things I could not have come up with. I marvel at Theodor Seuss Geisel, and Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, full of nonsense words and patterns which are, essentially, words horribly misspelled and mangled for a larger purpose.
I naturally want to obey rules, whether in art or language, and I have for too long fallen victim to perfectionism and the need to police it in others to reassure myself of my own value and intellect. To my great delight, I find that my brain seems to be speeding up faster than my hands can translate and that more errors and slips seem to seep into the creative endeavors that I try so hard to control.
Perfectionism cracks under speed. I quit being so harsh on others, and some truly unique things come through a gate that is opened by the heralds of typos and grammar slip-ups. It is as if the jarring mistake tosses a stone in the still surface of our mind and gets us to notice the bump and do a bit of thinking.
But there are no allowances for such things, it seems, because of the grammar police.
And Lo, They Were The Grammar Police
The grammar police are a unique linguistic breed, who seem to want a world without errors, marching under the flag of professionalism and intelligence. All things must be as they are supposed to be, with no exceptions. They even point out–yes, true story–that they aren’t the grammar police if they are correcting a typo, for a typo isn’t technically grammar.
And how do they justify their behavior?
1. You Have To Earn The Right To Make Mistakes
It was in winter, my third year of college, during a Thursday morning critique, and a fellow art student had pinned his latest ink drawing to the wall. Immediately a professor leapt at his use of repetitive line work. The student ducked his head a bit, and when the professor came up for air, the student named a few other well-known artists he liked who did something similar and who he was trying to learn from by trying their style.
“They are famous, and they’ve earned the right to break the rules,” the professor said. The class laughed, and I wondered at the logic.
If Lewis Carroll had written the Jabberwocky on a blog years before any renown, would he be slaughtered on Twitter for his use of the non-word “frumious”?
2. It’s Not Professional To Have Errors
I write thousands and thousands of words a week and read even more, watching for errors under time constraints. I miss some. And, on some days, I miss many. Am I more professional based on the quantity of errors I do or do not commit?
To err is human. To correct that err is the parasitic sanctuary of the grammar police.
Professional is a strange word. The grammar police seem to think the output is what makes you a professional, that visible product. That is part of it, certainly.
But professionalism also entails how experienced you are at something and how well you understand the foundation of what you’re doing, as well as how you react towards those behaving poorly. You might have 20 years of experience and be extremely skilled and professional in all other aspects, but you still commit typos.
In other words, the outward appearance of the product is only a sliver of the full professional package, though it is what people see and judge, particularly grammar police people. All other qualities of professionalism are unfortunately sacrificed on the altar of “i before e except after c.”
“I just think it looks more professional,” they say, and that is the key phrase: looks. Much like the smooth-talking serial killer, it looks more professional. Ted Bundy was a professional of sorts.
Perhaps the amateur has more creative freedom than the professional, more leeway to whiffle through the tulgey wood, using writing as their vorpal blade.
Perhaps, because I am a professional, I will discover the errors on my own when I go back and re-read my work and change them on my own terms. Perhaps I’m serving up sloppy joes and fine dining and sack lunches and finely plated desserts at any given moment, looking for intellectual gourmands instead of light-weight pretentious gourmets.
Whatever the case, the grammar police are a difficult crowd to please, and people I know who do I avoid sharing my work with freely. New work, especially, needs some time to turn cartilage into bones and stand on its own.
3. The Grammar Nazis Are Only Trying To Help
I have had, over the 13 years of blogging on the internet, friends and foes alike point these errors out. Friends, I assume, do so for “my benefit”, believing that what they want, I want. Some might be on the spectrum, though I am not.
“I’m just trying to help you out,” more than one email has said before a friend points out a typo in the day’s blog post or a post he read from five months ago. “You used the wrong form of the word ‘their’ in the third paragraph.”
Unsolicited help is a courageous thing to offer, especially to someone holding a sharp pencil.
Just as I prefer to approach people as how they are, and not as how I think they could or should be, I take the same approach to their creative work. I prefer that others would do the same. Some folks see things first as what they aren’t, and fixate on correcting it. This, they think, is helping. This, I think, is horse assery.
A Measurement Of Intellect
After more than a decade of emails noting errors, blog comments pointing out misspellings at the end of my magnum opus, and snitty snarky tweets gloating about corrections, I’ve come to understand that the grammar police have a different expectation of the purpose of the written word. They are protecting the integrity of the codex, perhaps, but I fear that the greatest idea in the world cannot find a place in their soul if there is an extra letter somewhere to be found.
I suspect it's about the grammar police more than the copy.
A feeling of superiority, a source of identity, a bad day and a chance to push someone down, an excuse for not taking the leap and creating much on their own, or perhaps something so crass, as I experienced, as emailing the info@company.com email at a startup to say that whoever was handling their blog was a rank unprofessional and should be fired and she, the bold emailer, should be hired immediately. After several weeks of this gal leaving comments on every post, I took some pleasure in informing her that I, also in charge of the blog, was the one who handled the info email, and her response was duly noted.
Such correction leaves me feeling cornered, that I need to prove to someone that I know how to write, how to speak, that I’m not illiterate. That I have to somehow conjure up how many books I’ve read, or some other proof that I and my ideas have viability despite a misplaced apostrophe. I despise this; we are not in a contest to see who is smarter unless you’re that annoying guy who has to one-up everyone in the room and correct people in the midst of conversation when someone says some fact that is incorrect.
No one likes that guy. And the grammar police are his first cousin.
I wrote a blog post yesterday as bait for today. I went fishing. No one commented on the actual content of the post, just typos.
Are editors always on the prowl, seeking whose copy they may devour, reading only for correction, unable to process a thought unless it fits a particular style guide? They must feel that they are the world's proofreader, parasitically feeding off of drips and spills of other’s minds.
More than all the flawless copy in the world, I want to read about great ideas and I want to write great ideas. The best writer, philosopher, and thinker isn’t the one who passes the standardized grammar and spelling test. You can find a flawless copy in the instructional manual of a Toilet. It means nothing.
As an art instructor said in college, regarding criticism: a critic is like a eunuch in a harem; he sees how it's done, knows how it's done, but can't do it himself. Extrapolate as you must, grammar police.
I didn’t hire you to proofread and edit my work, so you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s not your job to reward or punish people based on their grammatical skills.
Is this the world we want to live in?
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