New Breadcrumb Trail: Grammar Police and the Schoolmarm

I'm slightly giddy from the fact that the book review I posted to Wordsy yesterday is the first thing that pops up on their site today with an extremely nice comment. In honor of being in a great mood, I decided to post my travels along my breadcrumb trail today.

I ran across a few things today that made me feel less bizarre. It all stared with a simple search for “better grammar”. I took a detour to grammarpolice.net which doesn’t talk about grammar at all as far as I could tell. Not discouraged in the least, I backtracked to the first crumb and started again.

Out of curiosity I tried grammar police as a search term and ended up with the Wordpress tag page for those words. The fact that there is such a page, with more than one blog listed, made me smile. There I found Morning Glory and her lovely post entitled Neither Financier Seized Either Weird Species of Leisure.

After completely enjoying that post (and agreeing with it wholeheartedly), I wandered off-course to saving the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. Snickering still, I returned to my trail.

I ran across the Triangle Grammar Guide, Pam Nelson, and her post titled Going All Schoolmarmy on This One. It’s about reflexive pronouns (myself, himself, herself, etc.) and their use and abuse. Not only does she share a pet peeve with me but she also notified me that ginormous is now in the Merriam Webster dictionary. I'm her newest fan. I’ll have to get a new dictionary so that I can tell my kids to “look it up” when they ask me how big ginormous really is. I haven’t worked up my own definition yet, you see.

The folks there have also added words like crunk and smackdown, which I like. Unfortunately, they felt the need to add “perfect storm” and viewshed. What is this world coming to when buzz words are in Merriam Webster? I shudder to think of it.