We first got to know each other through letters. Then, quite a few letters later, she wrote, "Your adorable!" "No," I replied, "YOU'RE adorable!" She must've thought I found her adorable when all I had been doing was point out to her a grammatical mistake.
That was twenty-five years ago. We are still married but I am no longer pedantic about her grammar (I reserve my pedantry to her cooking).
Not that I've given up the fight when it comes to what I read. The apostrophe is being killed by the internet. No one knows where commas belong — is it Oxford? Texting has led to words being shortened in ways tht are guaranteed to annoy. How much effort did the missing “a” require? Worse still, entire words are replaced by single letters. Mercifully, not everything is lost when even the youngest texters still know that all sentences have to end with an exclamation mark!
I am still irritated by the sight of a “who” where a “whom” should be, and I am also still drawn towards the correct placing of the word "only", except on those occasions when I am not. There is something pleasantly jarring about insisting you are here only for the beer, rather than only here for the beer. In the more common and incorrect variant, the word 'only' is qualifying not beer but here, which could lead people to think that you are only here and indifferent to the libation.
Does it really matter when no one is really confused? Should I switch to oral pedantry and rage at the persistent interjection of "like" into sentences, and the contraction of "could have", "should have", and "would have" into "could of", "would of", and "should of"?
I guess I shall always remain pedantic about those phrases that irk me. Or is it phrases which irk me? Or maybe phrases by which I am irked?
