A Member of the (not so) Secret Grammar Police

You may or may not know this about me: like a lot of other dorky writers, I'm a bit of a language and grammar nut. I know in this blog I don't always use 100% proper grammar 100% of the time. But I can assure you that 99.9% of the time, if I don't? It's on purpose, for reasons of literary integrity, cadence, emphasis, etc.

A blog is not a formal paper, after all. Sometimes I want it to sound like we're having an intimate conversation, like I'm sitting beside you, whispering my thoughts, inches from your ear. And friends? I don't always speak in complete sentences, with proper grammar, it's true.

But some stuff? The really egregious stuff? Drives me completely batty. Like using the wrong "there, their or they're." Really, people, didn't you learn that in second grade?

See? I instantly become a member of the secret grammar police, schoolmarmish, clucking my tongue and rolling my eyes and generally taking everything you say 50% less seriously if you use certain words wrong. I'm sorry. I know it's elitist. But I can't help myself.

But also, like (I think) all grammarians, I have my favorite, pet non-grammatical phrases. I know they're dead wrong but love them anyway. Like this one: "needs done."

And? "Y''all." Because there is NO plural for you in "proper" English. And it needs one, doesn't it? "Y'all" will suffice. 

And then there's punctuation. My blog voice is halfway between literary & conversational, making it sometimes hard to find just the right balance between "proper" and functional.

So often I literally hear the words in my head as I write, and then am scrambling to find a way to make the punctuation work just right so that you will hear them EXACTLY the way that I heard them, too - or as close as you can since you will likely be hearing your own voice reading my words to you.

Unless you are my friend in real life, then you might hear my actual voice talking to you. Or not.

Maybe you hear Katharine Hepburn or Carol Kane or your Aunt Matilda (or Tweetie Bird for that matter) reading my words in your head. I have no control over that. We never really know what is going on inside other people's heads anyway, do we? (OK, digression over, back on topic now...)

But, even though I have no REAL control, I do what I can to clone my voice into your brain. Trying to parse things like: What sort of pause is a dash verses a comma, a comma verses a semi-colon? What level of emphasis is ALL CAPS verses bold verses being set off with *apostrophes*? How much of a shout is *ALL THREE AT ONCE*? (And is that ever justified?)

Also? Correct pronunciation counts. Sorry but it does.

I was raised by New Yorkers who had no New York accents, who were literate and believed that sounding intelligent was a good thing. (Did this get me shunned on the playground from time to time, left as the cheese who stands alone in the games of Farmer in the Dell? Probably, but it was worth it.)

If you said "axe" instead of "ask" around my mother? She would literally turn green, ask who you were planning to chop up. And our next door neighbor kids, who I played with every summer? Their Mom was from South Carolina. Axe, axe, axe away how they pronounced THAT one.

I've learned in the wisdom of my old age to keep my damn mouth shut, to not actually roll my eyes, to keep my polite on; because I really don't need to get into silly altercations about such trivial things after all, do I?

But in my mind? The schoolmarm is quite alive.

Take "nuke-u-lar."  Pronounce nuclear that way, and I immediately shave approximately 30 IQ points right off you. Which is why if I ever hear any of this come out of Ethan's mouth? (And I do.)  I get on his case like a tiger.  He pushes back: "It's not fair, Mom, Jake says stuff wrong all the time." And that's true.

But Jacob has an excuse. He has autism, and furthermore, his particular flavor of autism is heavy on the language processing deficit stuff. Ethan knows this, knows if he goes on I will ask him the up-shutting question: "Do you really want to trade places with your brother? Because you know, life has actually been very not fair to him. But if you'd really prefer to be the twin with autism..."

And yes, I know this seems like nitpicking. But remember, in the animal kingdom actual nitpicking is an act of friendship and camaraderie. An important part of the social contract among our primate ancestors: you pick my bugs off and and I'll pick yours.

Speaking of which, since no one is proofreading my stuff but me, and sometimes I'll miss things that are obviously a mistake - like dropped apostrophes on "it's" and missing prepositions - if you DO catch something in my blog that needs fixing and isn't a clear style choice? Would you let me know?

I know it's not in the official spirit of blogging - write it and move on - but I *WILL* go back in and correct things in my posts. Sometimes multiple times (but not on Stream of Consciousness Sundays which are supposed to have all mistakes left intact, YIKES).

Because those occasional stray commas? Make me twitch if I find them in my blog. Oh, yeah, it's, fun, being, me. (Twitch.)

Note: This post is one from the Zombie Files. Since yesterday I said that they were "coming soon," I figured I had better make good on that promise, and sooner rather than later.


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Hanging Ten

Yesterday I was a bit of a hot mess.  I wanted to write a new blog post, because, as you may have noticed, I have written nearly every day this month. Way more than I ever have.

Maybe I'm feeling inspired by all my friends doing the NaNoWriMo or the NaBloPoMo challenges (apologies to my civilian readers, that's real insider bloggity-bloggish stuff).  Or maybe I just have bucketloads of stuff to say and am giving up unimportant things this month, like sleep.

But yesterday?  I was just all unfocused and fuzzy, like my slippers, which I almost walked out the door in that morning.

And writing?  Takes focus.  Even if it's a dreamy focus like when I'm deep in the grief and go into a fugue-ish state and the words just flood out of me like water from a cracked jug.

But tweeting?  Reading (and commenting on) OTHER people's blogs?  Perfect for ADD-rific me some days.  Like yesterday, when all my writing mojo spilled out across the internet, splashed onto other people's blogs.  I was a commenting dervish.

And then there's Twitter.  If you tweet, you understand the appeal of the fairy dust.  And if you don't?  You (probably) think I'm a twit.  Well, you're both right.  Probably.

So (focus, please, here!), yesterday, when I sat down to write, I just didn't have it in me.  I thought: "Damn, I have no words left today, I dropped them all off at other people's houses."

But you know?  Maybe I can visit them tonight, and take a picture and show you (because I am a technical genius and know how to make my Mac do screen shots) and impress you with how smart/funny/cute/ranty and... commenty I was yesterday.

And at the sheer wonderfulness of this approach?  Besides not having to write anything really coherent tonight?  I get to introduce you to some more terrific blogs and bloggers.

And also?  I'm kind of new-ish to this blogging thing, haven't even had my "bloggaversary" yet. So I don't really know what the rules of this world are, and if I'm breaking any of them by doing this bit here.

But also?  I don't really care.  I'm following one of the operational rules of my old career in TV/film production: it is often easier to ask forgiveness than permission. 

So here is me yesterday, flying in from elsewhere, inspired by the wonderful funny, smart or heartbreaking words of others to add a few of my own.  Or in my case, more than a few.  Because, as you may have noticed, I tend to be "long-form" (that's not baggage, that's just the size of my suitcase)...

First off, lets mosey on over and take a look at my early morning Twitterstream:

And then, after joking about it, I nearly did just that by accident.  Clairvoyance?

Um, I was a bit tired yesterday morning.  But also?  Somehow giggly instead of grumpy.  Thank goodness, because I really hate having a three dwarf morning.

Yeah, I'm going to win a Pulitzer with my tweets.

Well, no.  But it does help to blow off steam and let me be kind and nice mom instead of bearish snappy mom.  And THAT is most definitely a good thing.

So after dropping off the offspring and spending a few hours in Jacob-life-management mode (wherein  I inventoried and re-ordered all my son's 10,000 medicines, vitamins and nutritional supplements from 5,000 different sources, and then poured out a week's worth of his 6 different types of a daily packets of them -- don't you just wish you had my life, now?) I allowed myself a little time to surf the interwebs, visiting old friends, discovering new wonders and dropping bits of myself off, my commenty calling cards, along the way.

Yes, I know, if that sentence were any longer it would need its own zip code.  I am working hard to earn my title "Queen of the Run-on-Sentence (with parenthetical clauses)".  How am I doing?

So, back to the matter at hand.   Picture me tiptoeing through the tulips in the garden of web... looking kind of like this:

That is an illustration from the amazing Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half.  If you ever really NEED to laugh?  Like, if your life depended on it?   Go there.

OK, so on Kris's blog Pretty All True my response to her funny/painful/honest post "Call Me" was this:

One of the (many) amazing things about Kris is that she always replies to each and every comment, often inciting layers of dialogue.  She is the most interactive blogger I know. And sometimes the comments are ALMOST more wonderful than her wonderful posts.  And best of all?  She likes me, she really likes me.  Cyber-me that is. Which is just fine.

Then I went to visit Jess's blog, a diary of a mom, and read her moving post "The Donut Shop."  Jess is an Autism Mom blogger, and this post was about how hard it is to go out to eat with her family.  But really, it was about so much more, about all the dreams you have for your family and what happens when you add Autism into the blender and hit pulverize.  Her post brought up all kinds of feelings for me, and I left this mini-rant of a comment:

And yes, I need to work on my proof-reading. That should have been "struck" not "truck."

And finally?  Yesterday was Stimey's monthly day over on the Hopeful Parents site (where I post every 10th of the month).  Stimey (real name Jean) is my web-friend and yet another Autism Mom Blogger.  She was a DC Metro area member of the defunct (and just now resurrected) Silicon Valley Moms Group blog,  a sister site to the NYC Moms Blog site I wrote for last spring.  We actually met (yes, in the real world, with our meat puppet bodies) at the BlogHer10 conference in NYC this past summer, and in fact kept bumping into each other every 5 minutes to the point where it became a running joke: "Oh, you again! Am I stalking you or are you stalking me?"

Her home blog is Stimeyland (although you can find her words all OVER the inter-webs) and she is in every way terrific (smart/funny/really real).  Her post at Hopeful Parents, called My Son Knows He Has Autism, was about how she talks with her son Jack (and whole family) openly and positively about his different brain. I read her post (and you should, too) and then left my 2 cents:

Yes, I know there's a proofreading fail in this one too. Thanks for pointing that out.

And that, my friends, is that.  Retiring my surfboard for the night before I reach too far and wipe-out.  Gonna grab a yogurt smoothie.  Take off my web-suit and excavate the sand out of my...

Ahem

Good night all, good night.