If you happen to care about grammar and spelling, then in these post-literate times you can expect to be considered a pedant by the semi-literate, and a "grammar nazi" by the illiterate. My blood pressure rises when I see misuses of the apostrophe, pluralization with an apostrophe, "impact" as a verb, "pro-active" in all its uses, "there is a lot" and "there is many", "He would have if he would have", among other errors familiar to the readers among whom I don't expect to see makers of such errors. Still, I realize that the battle has been lost now. Here and elsewhere. Pidglish rules, and only foreigners speak proper English. I've known semi-literate CEOs who had graduated from Stanford.
A teacher told me once that people who make common grammatical and spelling mistakes tend to be non-readers, simply because we first learn to write by, gasp, reading. Do I want to read opinions of non-readers?
I have trouble with commas, commaizing too often or too little (hey, I can verbize as well as anybody!), but I was happy to read recently that my favorite author and conservative Mark Hel prin himself engages in battles with the editor of his books over commas.
I was less happy the other day reading the fifth or sixth novel of my new favorite author, recommended to me last year by the WSJ's mystery editor Tom Nolan, who (the author) writes literary mysteries, and has written over two dozen of them, while still remaining pretty much in the shadows, as my visits to the bookshelves of local Goodwill stores confirm where the Lee Childs rule. I hear he's more popular in Europe, even in translation, and at least one of the reader reviews on Amazon complains about his writing being too literary (!) (You guess his name!) By the way, is Cormac McCarthy's blood and gore "literary"? I'm asking because I haven't read him and refuse to watch the blood and gore movies made from his novels.
But I digress. In the mystery I am reading, in three places (so far) my new favorite published author uses the verb "to peddle" when he clearly means "to pedal", as he describes a boy riding a bicycle. What the heck? I've seen this error here more than once, just as I see daily "boarder" for "border" and "your" for "you're", among other beauties of our post-literacy, but a published author, edited by a professional editor?
Should I then write the man a hate mail?
