Letter-worthy? ash addresses that issue in her letter responding to the following letter:
• A mistake like this? You’re kidding
Arrrrgggghhhhh! I turned on Channel 22 in the wee hours of the morning hoping to hear a symphony, piano, violin, etc., but found the March 20 District 186 Board of Education meeting. Interesting, but nothing I felt a deep need to know.
Then a blue screen flashed before my eyes and in large white letters is stated “YOUR WATCHING ...” Come on now. Surely, there is someone out there who knows it should say “YOU ARE ...”
No, spell check doesn’t catch that sort of error, but people check does. The difference between “your” and “you are” used to be taught by fourth grade. Can’t we do better?
Martha Bradley, Retired teacher, Springfield
Retired teacher Martha Bradley certainly does speak for me when she laments the inability or refusal of students to learn grammar in elementary school.
Neither a teacher myself nor instructed by Ms. Bradley, since I wasn’t raised in Springfield, I share her frustration. I was the nerd who paid attention while most of my classmates were busy passing notes. Thus, they grew up not knowing the difference between not only “there” and “they’re” but “its” and it’s” as well.
I’m particularly amused by the incorrect placement of nominative pronouns after prepositions, demonstrated in such phrases as “It would be okay for Larry and I” and “between Larry and I, we have eight children” in a City-State column the day preceding Ms. Bradley’s letter. What’s funny is not that that’s wrong, but that it’s apparently wrong in a painstaking effort to be correct, as in “When ‘I’ sounds awkward, saying it anyway will make me seem educated.” Which is why I call this ironic phenomenon pseudo-grammar.
How much does grammar matter? Maybe not terribly, unless your interest is in convincing the listener or reader that you’re not ignorant in spite of having ignored fourth grade.