Tomorrow, March 4th, is National Grammar Day! Martha Brockenbrough launched the day in 2008 out of frustration. According to a Tribune article that I couldn't find online, her goal is to get people to think about language and why "being careful with it matters." I wondered if she is complaining about the same old, same old, like "which" and "that" and not ending a sentence with a preposition, etc. If so, she needs to get a life...and read a little more, particularly on Wordcraft!

I did like some of the puns, like having a grammartini, a party-ciple or lots of punch-uation on this holiday. What more can you come up with?

I also liked this haiku that a technical writer (Gord Roberts) wrote:

Spell-checkers won't catch
You're mistaken homophones
Scattered hear and their.

Brockenbrough wrote a letter to the Toronto Maple Leafs wondering if the "Canadian school system teaches its children how to construct plural nouns" because she thinks it should be Toronto Maple Leaves.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

If she's fondue men, she might end a sentence with a proposition and end up with a good puck from a Maple Leaf.

I have a friend who attended the same tiny grammar school as I did, back in the '50's. She recently reminded me of "Good English Week", which was held every spring. During that week, we were provided with small cards with which we 'ticketed' each other for grammatical errors. The King and Queen who led our May Day parade were the boy and girl who had accumulated the fewest tickets.

I can only imagine what constituted errors back then; our English books were little dark-blue bound 'Primers' which probably dated to the early '40's!

I imagine most of the tickets weren't actually errors at all.

I was talking to my daughter today about national grammar day, which got us talking about things like "which" and "that." Oh, she sounded so like Strunk and White. I referred her to Language Log.

The blog entry that goofy linked to is a great illustration of how a linguist (or somebody who studies language) describes some small bit of grammar, and how the peevers (people who collect rag-bags full of pseudo-grammatical fiats) often get things wrong because they haven't really studied grammar and how languages work. Most of them do not even know what grammar is or how to study it by observation of speakers and writers rather than the dyspeptic authors of books like that one by Strunk & White.

Nice entry, goofy.

One thing I have learned here is what grammar is, and what it isn't. When our editor tells me she corrected my grammar mistake (maybe by deleting or adding a comma that would make no difference either way), I just smile inwardly about how little she knows about the word "grammar."