Breaking Brad: or, why Grammar Nazis is good for ya

Like most people, I often want to beat the shit out of that subspecies of human we refer to as “the grammar Nazi.” You know, that sumbitch that's always telling you it's “whom” and not “who” or “me” and not “I.” Who tells you the comma should be a semicolon, or that you ended the sentence in a preposition and shouldn't have, because it "just isn't done." You know, that guy.

Unlike most people – I say this uncomfortably, with some upper-lip sweat, but I've gotta say it – I must confess I am occasionally that grammar Nazi. I've pulled on the black boots and carried the whip and Luger of the full-fledged, heel-clicking, monocle-wearing, grammar-syntax-spelling-punctuation fascist. Hail grammar!

Schizophrenic? Never been diagnosed. Hypocrite? Possibly. Morally correct? Here is my argument that I am. And it starts with a little discussion about brads. Yup, you heard me, brads.

A brad, for those of you who don't know, is a little brass paper fastener, about 2 ¾ inches long, which is used to hold together bodies of paper too thick to be stapled. It can be truly said that Hollywood runs on brads. They are the ammunition for its machine gun, the cream for its coffee, the peanut butter for its jelly. You can't have Hollywood without brads, because without brads, every script in this town would fall apart, literally, just like that. Given that every script has at least 90-odd pages, and there are hundreds of thousands of scripts in this city, it would be a total disaster. An explosion in a confetti factory. Doom.

Now, it so happens that hole-punchers make three holes: top, middle and bottom. So in theory, each script requires three brads. But in reality, only two are used: one at the top and one at the bottom. The middle is left empty. Always. In fact, if you submit a script to a studio, and they see it has three brads in it, or they see that it has brads in the top and middle, or middle and bottom, holes, they will throw it in the recycling bin faster than you can say “broken dreams.” They will not look at the title. They will not read the first page. They will not hand it a blindfold and a cigarette. They will just pull the trigger.

If this seems capricious or cruel, well, it is – cruel anyway. But it is not capricious. It has a very definite rationale, a cold and ruthless purpose. The purpose is to save time.

Hollywood is a town of wannabees. I say that with no malice. Nearly everyone here, myself included, is aspiring to be something other than what they actually are at the moment you meet them: actors, comedians, musicians, producers, directors...and scriptwriters. And a million wannabe scriptwriters means a million scripts. Those scripts pour into studio offices all day, every day, all year long. A friend of mine here told me his own office gets six hundred a week. Theoretically, every one of these has to be read and then summarized so it can be rejected or moved on for further study. It is verboten to simply throw away stacks of scripts because you, the studio reader, don't feel like reading them or are utterly overwhelmed by the influx. After all, you might be chucking away the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But there is one exception to this rule. It is unwritten, but it is universally practiced. If a script comes in with three brads, or improperly placed brads, into the garbage chute it goes, and no one will bat an eye. But why, you ask – why? The answer is that because the rule about brads is so well known, it is assumed – with some degree of justification – that anyone who doesn't know it is a slovenly amateur whose writing won't be any better than their script etiquette. Their scripts can be destroyed unread with a clear conscience. So the tradition goes, anyway.

Okay, you say, now I know about brads and this arcane folkway of Hollywood script-readers. What the heil does that have to do with grammar Nazism?

When I am on the internet, be it Facebook or Twitter or the comments section of any website whatsoever, the first thing that strikes me is the aggressiveness of the posts. The issue people are posting about doesn't matter: gardening, politics, martial arts, kittens, the starship Enterprise – all irrelevant. The human being, safe behind anonymity and a keyboard, is evidently quite the little Ghengis Khan, and will launch a full-fledged, often vicious verbal attack on anyone or anything who disagrees with them in the slightest way on any subject. But when I look at attacks on the internet of any kind, especially those directed at me, one of the first things I take note of is the way they are executed. Is the attacker coherent? Do they write in complete sentences? Is there a structure to their argument? Are the spelling, grammar, punctuation and so forth they use correct or reasonably so? Do they commit any logical fallacies? It's a quick mental checklist, a sort of red-pen rundown I perform automatically, just the way the bleary-eyed script-reader checks each new arrival on his desk for the proper number and arrangement of brads.

You see, it all comes down to credibility. If someone is calling me ignorant who cannot spell the word, if someone is calling me stupid who writes two pages without using a comma and capitalizes more or less when they feel like it, I can assume with reasonable certainty that they are idiots or badly educated and that I can safely ignore what they have to say. If, on the other hand, they can write a proper sentence and construct a proper argument, I will probably listen (meaning read) and if it is not too insulting, give it a fair hearing before I respond. The person may be a jerk, but they know how to use the bloody brads. So to speak.

Snobbish, you say: many intelligent people lack schooling or are just plain bad writers. By red-penning their thoughts instead of arguing with them, I'm being cruel and unhelpful and even sidestepping the debate, whatever the debate may be. This is undeniably true, and it is undeniably unfair. But then some very good scriptwriters have failed the brad test and had their stuff shitcanned because of a misplaced paper fastener, and that, too, is unfair. The hard truth is the script-reader must have ways of thinning the herd. He must establish minimum prerequisites, a run of basic criteria, which if not met disqualify the script-writer, or else he will never get anything done at all. He must, in short, learn to discriminate. And isn't that a loaded word? Applied one way it is a horrible act. Applied another way it is a compliment – the ability to discriminate between, say, between shit and apple pie is important if you are hungry. And that is what the internet is: shit and apple pie. And it's a lot of the former and very little of the latter. We must have a way to discriminate between the two, and it seems to me that gauging the "English IQ" of someone who writes you a snarky or argumentative message is not a bad place to start.

Notice I said start, not end. Someone may be writing you who speaks English as a second or third language, or who is using voice-to-text, or is in a great rush or under pressure or had to drop out of school in eighth grade to get a job to support themselves. These people ought to get passes. I am speaking here mainly of people who are being aggressive, obnoxious, rude, insulting, and just plain nasty. If they are also sloppy in the bargain, why let them off? Why bother sifting through the chaos of their poorly-formed thoughts? Better to simply to lay hands on the grammar Nazi whip and let fly. It will infuriate them, it will make them look foolish, and when you get tired of it you can always destroy their arguments using a less persnickety weapon, like logic. The fact is that Grammar Nazism is often used by people who have no actual answer to an argument and want to distract their opponent and any onlookers from this fact; in that regard it is a logical fallacy itself. I do maintain that is not a legitimate substitute for an argument, but when your attacker is not making an argument but merely slinging mud or spewing nonsense, it is a viable option. The English "brad test" is designed to separate those who don't know the rules from those who do: it does not finish the selection process, but starts it.

I think we can all agree that Grammar Nazism is a terrible thing to be subjected to. I've been on the receiving end of that whip several times and it stings my ego terribly and makes me want to beat the shit out of the person using it – especially if, as I just said, they don't have an argument to make and want to harp on my misuse of a comma or some other trivial nonsense. But that is the nature of weaponry. It can be used by you, or it can be used against you, so it's best to establish a kind of Geneva Convention of Grammar Nazism. Perhaps we could establish a cultural rule that forbids hissy-fits over things like missing semicolons and dangling participles under certain definite conditions, while excusing G.N.'s of their G.N.-ism when a written statement is so egregiously sloppy and stupid that it practically begins to be deconstructed with a rusty scalpel. Perhaps that is a good idea. But in the mean time, goddamn it, I will retain my Grammar Nazi uniform and eight-headed whip and use them, or not, as I see fit. It so happens that I enjoy the screams.