A Day in the Life of a Grammar Nazi
I stop on the sidewalk and look up at the billboard, it reads: "Special Discount on watermelon's, Buy too and get one free!" My heart stops, surely the biggest supermarket in the country wouldn't make such ghastly typos? I force myself to look away and come face to face with a street sign "Drive slow. School A head" A head? This is about as much as I can take. I clench my fists, ready to punch the thin sheet of metal with all my might but hit something soft and warm instead. A pillow? I open my eyes and discover I'm in bed. Just another nightmare, I sigh in relief.
Brushing it off, I spend the next few minutes making breakfast and rushing because being late for work means an unbearable lecture from my boss - Your late will not be tolerated! If only I could explain how difficult it is to refrain from correcting him, "Don't you mean lateness, Sir?" I'm ready to dig into my breakfast when I realise posting a quick photo on Instagram shouldn't take more than a minute, so I take out my phone and start thinking of an appropriate caption. "#Breakfast food is my favourite." I start gobbling down the food but stop halfway. The caption is bothering me. Would "breakfast foods are my favourite" sound better? This is a tough one, so I ask myself the one question I live by – is it grammatically correct? I rush back to the post, hoping no one has tried to correct it by now, and start editing the caption. But I'm not entirely sure and since it is better to say nothing than to say something grammatically incorrect, I delete the post completely.
I am half an hour late to work thanks to the breakfast episode, but luckily my boss hasn't noticed. I get straight to work by aimlessly scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed. I come across some cute shoes that I'm tempted to order online, but as I take a closer look I notice the comments – Pricplz, How much this? There's around twenty of them and a rough calculation tells me I'll need five minutes to correct all of them to "Could you please tell me the price?" with an asterisk. Five minutes later, I find myself feeling much better.
Next, I come across my friend's status, "Finally watched The Revenant. Hated it. Leo didn't deserve that Oscar." My eyes widen in horror, I knew she had stupid opinions but this was just untrue! I comment saying that she has poor taste and that Leo is the best actor ever. She responds with an elaborate reply about how "the best actor ever" is subjective. I don't really know how to argue with this. Taking a second look, I notice she wrote "Everyone is entitled to THERE own opinion." A smug look takes over my face and I prepare a 200 word comment about how wrong her opinion is because her grammar is "pathetic".
Content with myself for winning this argument logically, I go over to the page Grammarly to update myself on common grammar mistakes people make nowadays. The world is full of misplaced apostrophes, incorrect tenses, and dangling modifiers and someone has to correct them!
Salma Mohammad Ali fears she is becoming a crazy cat lady and uses writing as a means to grasp on to sanity. Send her your views/hate/love at fb.com/salma.ali209