Chapter 7: Don’t Be a Grammar Nazi
***Please note: anything in [ ] was a footnote in my word processing document.***
If you ever want to make friends and keep them, too, then don’t be the grammar nazi I was. [Person who corrects everyone's grammar and spelling whether or not others like it.] People play WoW to have a good time, not improve their English.
This took a long time for me to learn yet, to this day, I have to clench my teeth and tell myself to breathe every time I see you’re, your, there, their, they’re, etc., used improperly, tomorrow spelled as “tomarrow”, along with other common misspellings. I’ve seen so much bad grammar that sometimes I lose track of when to use “good” versus “well”, along with a couple other common grammatical errors. I have a Master’s in writing; it’s what I’m devoting my life to be a master of. I often forget not everyone knows what I know, and that I just need to leave their poor grammar alone.
Before I learned to shut up and put up, I was thoroughly convinced I was helping. I’m the kind of person that, if I do something wrong, I hope someone corrects me so I can learn and grow. I thought I was returning the favor by correcting my fellow guildies incessantly, despite their incessant “I don’t care” retorts.
“I’m only trying to make you smarter,” I insisted.
“I don’t care. This isn’t an English class.”
“You should care. English is your native language and you can’t even write it well. Aren’t you embarrassed?” That being a tactlessly blunt thing to say, I made a few people hate me. In retrospect it’s easy to see why. Nobody wants to indirectly be called stupid. So, when I got the not-an-English-class retort yet again, I changed my reply to, “Don’t you want to be smarter?”
Of course they didn’t. I received a wide range of colorful responses that baffled me. I didn’t get it. I love learning. I didn’t understand disinterest in learning.
Since I was such the grammar nazi, my guilds would lie in wait for an opportunity to correct me. Too bad for them, it was only with typos. I’m notorious for typos to the point where we made a running joke about me being possessed by the “Typo Demon” which I managed to call the “Tupe Deomn” once and was never let down for that.
The Typo Demon is so powerful that He won’t let you type his name correctly sometimes!
All the typo demon really is, is my fingers’ inability to keep up with my thoughts. It happens to everyone.
Anyway, typos were the one thing I never corrected because they were honest mistakes, instead of a sign of lack of knowledge. Whenever they’d pick on me for generating a typo, I’d explain that it was a typo and not a misspelling.
“What’s the difference?”
“Misspellings are intentional and typos are unintentional.”
People insisted there was no difference, and I got fed up with having this same argument where I decided to agree to disagree. It wasn’t until years later that I finally kicked the terrible grammar nazi habit and left people be. I don’t remember how I finally learned to stop being so annoying, but at some point someone patiently taught me I was being tactless and that I just had to let their bad grammar go. People don’t like being publicly corrected like that. It’s embarrassing and not good timing.
I heeded these words of wisdom and people found me a lot more pleasant to hang around. And then it became amusing that, after I kicked the habit, I started noticing other grammar nazis. Sometimes I passed on the wisdom passed on to me. Other times I let things unfold as they would. They would one day learn, too.
