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April 7, 2005

Grammar Nazis at work

Grammatical issues fascinate me, in part because they provide an intriguing set of rules to explore, and I can marvel at their "machinery." Plus, I enjoy the fact that the right combination of expressions can clarify ambiguities in a sentence if you get them just right. Plus, some statements just "make sense" and some don't, and it annoys me to no end when an idiom gets corrupted into meaninglessness.

On that note, the use of the term "straight and narrow" rather than the more correct "strait and narrow" earned a stern rebuke in this discussion on the Washington Monthly weblog. After people jumped on the rebuker for his rightful correction, mostly with defenses of "both are correct," he finally lost patience and gave this sarcastic reply:

Welcome to the land of linguistic laziness where prescriptivists must lay low as flout becomes flaunt, supercede supersedes supersede, and unnatural verbing grows our discourse.

Oh well. For all intensive purposes, it looks like we've lost the fight--and I could care less

Posted by Dean at April 7, 2005 2:20 PM

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