The Grammar Police

Between the usual travel photos, check ins and musings on everything from sports to daily poo’s, an alarming trend has emerged on my Facebook feed. They are the self-professed "Grammar Police", an army of pretentious kids commenting on people's statuses by inserting apostrophes into mis-spelt words.



This is not an attack on grammar itself. I actually quite like grammar and its wonderful uses. As an aspiring writer you hope I would as well. Seeing people write in SMS speak can be irritating to me. Seeing passages of writings with "ur" and "lyk" are next to illegible to me and will usually be disregarded with a pithy remark (in my head). However I am under no illusion that sometimes my writing could use a polish. I use too many commas and my sentences are too long. I may even make *gasp*.... spelling mistakes. Sometimes I may slip and break the rules, I am human.

This brings me back to the "Grammar Police", who end up being more like a "Grammar Neighbourhood Watch". These aren't people that uphold the values of grammar as they enjoy writing. These are people that enjoy pointing out other people's inaccuracies and asserting their intellectual dominance.

They are basically, dicks. They pick on poor people who have written things like "your" and then below write "it's you're". I assume then they grin smugly in to the computer and feel really good about themselves. Pointing out people’s stupidity makes people feel good. I can't deny it. But apostrophes? Really? It doesn't really take genius levels of intellect to know where an apostrophe goes. I remember learning it in primary school, complete with picture of apostrophes parachuting in between the letters in the correct place.

They will also correct "there" and "their". To me this proves that they have at least a primary school education. You do not need to go to University to know this, although I presume University is probably where this behaviour manifests itself the greatest. It feels redundant to pick on these people, especially when most of them are normal people who may have just typed something in a hurry, or more likely been super drunk. If this sort of stuff appeared in a news article, or a story, go ahead and be appalled. When someone uses social media to write "your a faggot", is it really the space the get intellectual on someone? Are they really going to take it to heart? The best you can hope for in their next message is that they write, "YOU'RE a faggot"

These people will do nothing more than this, to them this is all grammar is. They will make mistakes just like everybody else. But they are untouchable as long as their apostrophes are in the right place. Pointing out other people's mistakes to feel better about yourself doesn't make you "Grammar Police". It makes you an asshole.