What Color WAS the Rose?........

My brother called me this afternoon just as the gymnastics Sneak Peek event was beginning. We normally only talk on the phone a couple of times a year, on his birthday and on mine (when he remembers). He doesn't typically call for trivial reasons, so I called him right back.

It seems his daughter, whom we lovingly (ahem) refer to as Precious Emma, brought home a note from the teacher last week.

It said, and I quote, "Emma has rose 7 levels!"

Excuse me?

At first it was funny.

It was funny that my brother was appalled enough by it that he called me.

My brother, while just as intelligent as the rest of us in the family (I don't know where we got the smart gene, but we all did), got his GED at a correctional facility. [He got the highest score ever, so he likes to claim that he was valedictorian of his class.] He has the smarts, just not necessarily the formal education.

And this is an educated professional. Who probably makes a lot more money than my brother. [Why do we always say that, as if money truly is a measure of a person's intelligence?] An educated person who should have a firm grasp on irregular verbs and their past participles.

What the hell can she possibly be teaching the rest of the first graders, those who don't come from smart families and who haven't ROSE seven levels?

[By the way, there are different levels of "smart". My brother has a daughter and a grandson in the same first grade class.]

The more I've thought about it, the angrier I've gotten. I probably shouldn't let my blood pressure get out of hand over this issue, but it has definitely ROSE.

Brother said he was tempted to correct the note and send it back to the teacher, but he didn't want it to negatively impact Precious Emma.

I have considered sending an anonymous letter to the principal. [I'm all about sending anonymous letters. I'm also considering sending one to someone at the gymnastics office, asking them NEVER to let a certain assistant coach speak into a microphone again. People all around me were wincing and putting their fingers in their ears.]

I've also considered a NOT-anonymous letter to the teacher, but not identifying whose relative I am. We don't have the same last name, but I'm sure she could figure out the connection. Unless everyone in her first grade class has also ROSE several levels.

I readily acknowledge that I'm a grammar snob, and I've been one from way back. It doesn't have anything to do with my being an English teacher; it started back in my teen years. I'm fairly tolerant of most people when it comes to the English language. I've even made mistakes myself, like last week when I sent the ingredients for wild rice-broccoli soup to Lawanda the Warrior Princess and included Cream of Chucken Soup on the list.

I'm very INtolerant, however, of educators who either A) don't know; or B) don't use correct English grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax.

Particularly those who are teaching my family members. No matter how precious they are.

My Reputation as a Grammar Snob.....

I got this cute birthday card from Nurse Jane, but my brother-in-law actually picked it out. It is so indicative of my reputation in the family as a grammar snob.


I don't really deserve ALL of the reputation. I don't go around correcting total strangers. I don't even correct friends and family members. Hubby routinely makes me cringe inwardly with his complete and total annihilation of the English language. But I never correct him.

When I was a teenager, my step-father Sam decided the entire family needed to improve upon our grammar. He put a jar in the kitchen, and anyone caught in a grammatical error had to put some kind of coin in the jar. Nickel, dime, I can't really remember.

About the second week of this experiment, he decided the jar needed to be thrown into the yard and I needed to be confined to my room for an indefinite period of time. I can't help it if I'm an all-or-nothing kind of person. I didn't just correct the occasional grammatical error. I had to catch them all.

With baseball season upon us, I am preparing myself for the bastardization of our language wrought upon us by play-by-play announcers. Skip Carey was one of the worst, God rest his soul, but he won't be getting on my nerves this season.

Pronouns are among my pet peeves. One of the things I hear them say during a game, and I'm pretty sure they are just bragging that they are on a first-name basis with the players, owners, managers, and girlfriends, is something along these lines:

• "We ran into Chipper in the elevator this morning, and he was telling Pete and I....."

Arrrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!!

I want to email them and tell them that the proper pronoun in this case is "me." You use the same pronoun with another noun as you would use if it were alone. You wouldn't say "....he was telling I....." so you don't say "he was telling Pete and I....."

A friend of mine showed me an email she got the other day, something she was supposed to have done and hadn't done expediently enough to suit this person or something, but I got sidetracked by a terrible pronoun reference. It said something like:

• "......so-and-so accosted James and I after the game....."

Same rules as above.

I know that way back in third grade, someone told us that you should never say "him and me" in a sentence. Well, that's true if it's the SUBJECT of the sentence. But in the objective form, "him and me" would be correct, as in the following sentence:

• "Mr. Piccolo offered a special reward to him and me for finding his lost cat."

You would say he offered a special reward to "him" and you would say he offered a special reward to "me," so those are the two pronouns you are supposed to use together. In this case the objective forms of the pronouns are used because they are both the object of the preposition "to."

Maybe that's a little too technical, so it's best just to use the short-cut that you use the same pronoun with another pronoun or noun that you would use if the pronoun were alone.

This grammar lesson has been brought to you today by the letters K and T and by the number 8.

Grammar Snobbery

I'm such a grammar snob....... I went to a particular cycling association's website, really just looking for a map, not to join their group or anything. But their website and all associated postings were so fraught with spelling errors that I clicked out. Even the map has terrible misspellings on it. Says a certain rule will be "strickley enforced." Don't they get the red squiggly lines like I do? I could attribute this snobbery to the fact that I'm an English teacher..........

.....but I have to admit that I was this way long before I started that career. In fact, (God forgive me), when I was a teenager and my mother and I were in church together, whenever the pastor made a grammatical error (and he made tons of them), Mom and I made eye contact with each other all the way across the sanctuary. No wonder I've been told I'm on the express train to hell.

I asked the woman at the Publix bakery to fix the writing on my sister's birthday cake. The cake was intended for three family members, so I asked that it say "Happy Birthday, Y'all." They had spelled it "ya'll." The lady looked at me like I was crazy when I asked her to move the apostrophe. So I told her MY SISTER was the grammar snob!!!!!!!!

I'm not this judgmental about most things, just spelling and grammar. Sigh. But I don't correct my husband, so maybe that can earn me some points back.