Grammar Aneurysm

It's a curse.

Those who know me will attest that poor grammar is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me. I have been known to use Sharpies to add an apostrophe where it's needed or delete it where it's not, simply for my own peace of mind. The larger and more noticeable the violation, the more agitated I get.

So when I can't fix the situation physically, I find a brief, passionate rant... a flaming, in the parlance of our times... is the best way to preserve my sanity. And in the case of the bumper sticker I saw today, physically fixing the situation would have involved arson, so I guess this post is my best shot.

The offending sticker, affixed to the back of a Subaru Outback on Schroeder Road, read, very simply, "Women make GREAT LEADERS! Your following one."

-- To which I responded, "No, I'm not, I'm following the grammatical equivalent of a fourth grader who doesn't know the difference between the contraction of "you" and "are" "you're" and the second-person pronoun "your," and she's probably responsible for setting back the cause of women's lib by ten years because of this one grammatical obscenity!"

Nails on a chalk board, man. I'm about as far from a misogynist as they come, but I wouldn't follow this lady's lead any farther than I could see myself, lest I get led off a damn cliff.

I take two basic issues with the fact that this bumper sticker was affixed to the car. 1), the obvious issue, is that Madame Subaru either didn't notice (bad) or didn't care (worse) that the wrong form of the homonym was used on her bumper sticker, and 2), that bumper sticker made it all the way through the chain of command at some bumper sticker manufacturer without getting fixed (worst), or, it was right to begin with and some "editor" changed it to the wrong form (worse than worst).

None of this would be an issue if we had laws on the books allowing corporal punishment for the most flagrant abuses of the English language. I mean, come on, English in America is more prevalent than porn on the internet. Let's take a little bit of pride in the language we speak and learn to speak it correctly.

And I would wager, whoever was in the Subaru, she probably voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary as well.