I love all the grammary goodness in The Vine, and was especially glad
to see you enact the necessary (albeit a little half-hearted)
smackdown to the they-naysayer yesterday.

One thing that the naysayers often overlook is that this construction
has been used in English for pretty much as long as there has BEEN
English. Like Shakespeare and Jane Austen? Well, they’re in the
they-sayers club. I often say “if it was good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough
for me,” and I use this construction with impunity.

I wish people would remember that good writing is like a love affair.
Overthinking it will always ruin it. Neither language nor love is
always logical. (All those people who think language SHOULD be mathy
and logical, who are counting up all the negatives and antecedents
and the number of things you used “between” with? They can Bite Me.)
Don’t contort your writing in order to follow eight different fidgety
rules at once; most of them were imposed on us by a bunch of cranky
Latin fetishists in the 1600s, anyway. If you’re a native speaker of
standard English with a half-decent education, most of what you write
will be idiomatic, if not deathless prose.

I’m not saying “throw away Garner and Fowler, ditch Strunk & White,
do whatcha like” (because you can take those books from me when you
pry them from my dead cold et cetera et cetera,) but I do think hyper-corrected, overly sanitized,
baked-not-fried writing is a bigger (and uglier) problem than the
completely idiomatic and natural “everyone should take their books to
class.”

Sorry for the rant! I go off on this all the time in the magazine I
edit, VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. I’d love to send you a couple
of back issues if you think you’d enjoy them. We’ve been indulging word geeks since
1974; I’ve been the editor since 1997.

Yours truly,
Erin McKean

Okay, I know you are as big a grammar freak as I am, so I thought I would ask
you about this problem.

Every single day at work I end up parked next to this annoying ORANGE SUV
that backs into the spot. The license plate on said vehicle is “I DCREE
2.” Every day I see that license plate, I want to beat the person who
drives it with a copy of The Elements of Style (which would be stupid,
because my copy is a small, thin, very old paperback). I have seen the
person, and this particular woman is one of the most annoying people in the
building where my office is located. She is loud, pushy, rude, and generally
involved in the most idiotic conversations on the planet. Would it be
wrong to leave an anonymous note that reads, “Decree is a transitive verb,
you moron,” along with a definition of how to use a transitive verb? I
can’t imagine that the “DCREE” could be meant to represent anything other
than “decree,” and you just can’t decree without actually decreeing
something!

I know this is kind of stupid, but since you get such heavy stuff all the
time, I thought a nice, light grammar question would shake things up a
bit.

Thanks,
PsychoGrammarGirl

I’ve been fencing — as in the sport — for about a year now. I love it to
death, train twice a week, annoy my friends with arcane details, et cetera. As you
may or may not know, there are three weapons in fencing — epee, sabre, and
foil — and the majority of fencers tend to prefer and specialise in one
weapon. I prefer two, epee and foil. I actually started fencing epee, which
is quite unusual. I was taught by a man I shall dub Galahad, and this is
where the problem starts.

Galahad is around fifty, and has a very, erm, unusual sense of humour. I
found lessons with him very stressful, because he would be constantly
yelling and berating me. He would tell me over and over that I was too small
and, in his words, “emotional” for epee. He eventually told me to give up
and learn foil, which I did, gladly.

Fast forward about eight months. Fencing away. Made some great friends in
the club. Fencing both foil and epee. Getting better and better at it, too.
Hadn’t seen Galahad around for quite some time. Then he starts coming to
training nights again. At any opportunity, he starts yelling and berating me
again, particularly if he sees me bouting someone in epee. He’ll stand by
the strip and, as I fence, tell me what I’m doing wrong. Once, he was
presiding (refereeing) an epee bout between a much more experienced epeeist
and me, and when it was discovered that my weapon hadn’t been scoring
properly, announced loudly that it didn’t matter because “she couldn’t have
scored any hits, anyway.” All these snide little comments are very, very
off-putting, particularly when I’m trying to focus on the bout, and it’s
gotten to the point where I won’t fence epee if he’s around.

And he doesn’t just comment on my fencing. He takes the time to point out
the size of my chest protector (plastic bra thing you really appreciate in a
sport based on poking), or how tight my new fencing jacket is. One time he
told me that I should take up pole dancing to “loosen up” on the piste.

Compounding all this are my very serious father issues. My own father died
four years ago when I was fifteen. Ever since then, I can’t bear being
criticised or yelled at by significantly older men. It just makes me cringe.
Even belligerent bus drivers make me want to curl into a ball and cry. So,
Galahad’s constant criticism and harassment really, really get to me.

I’ve asked Galahad to stop watching or commenting when I fence, but he’s
ignored me. I’ve mentioned the problem to the other people in the club, but
they’ve told me to ignore him, as he’s just “being Galahad.” I’m tired of
not fencing epee, or being asked by a man old enough to be my father if I’m
a natural blonde. My question is, what should I do? Am I being
hyper-sensitive? I don’t want to be some shrinking violet, but I don’t want
to go on being harassed. Oh, and for the record, ours is the only fencing
club in the city, so I can’t change clubs. I’ve made friends here, anyway,
so I wouldn’t want to.

Thank you so much for any help,
Piste Off

I’m sure you’re probably going to throw your hands up in the air at the end of this one, but for reasons of not wanting everyone and their sister poking into my personal life, you are the only one who I feel I can ask advice of.

I’ve been seeing R for a while now. I love her dearly, and we’ve been talking about moving in together, the whole enchilada. So where, you ask, is the problem. Well, here is where it gets sticky. We both suffer from bi-polar illness. The big difference is that I’ve gotten help. I’ve gotten drugs, I’ve gotten better. While she hasn’t. In fact, she refuses to get help of any kind.
This was fine for the first several months of our relationship. But lately, she’s been having a lot of problems. I understand exactly what she’s going through, better than most people, I’m sure. Unfortunately, she seems to think that this means she can vent on me every time something goes “wrong.”

Now, I’m a typically passive person. Before I got help, if someone criticized me, I would immediately try to do better, and make it up to that person. Now, when R criticizes me, I merely feel annoyed. It’s gotten to the point where she sits around and moans that the house isn’t clean, the laundry isn’t done, there isn’t any money. Meanwhile, I’ll be cleaning the house and trying to cheer her up.

Sooo…the laundry won’t get done, because who likes to do laundry if you don’t have to, and she’ll whine about how I don’t take any initiative. Of course, I will have just cleaned the whole house (where I don’t even live) and hauled her ass into the shower and into some clothes. She won’t take any responsiblity for her own actions. Just blames everything on me.
If I bring up the fact that she seems manic/depressed, and should take some meds, or call her therapist, she gets mad at me and says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Same applies to any other “unpleasant” topic of conversation. This could be the state of our finances, or the fact that I didn’t find the time to email her that morning, when I knew that I’d be seeing her that night. I am starting to feel constantly put down, pushed around, ignored, and also leaned upon to an outstanding degree. First she’ll tell me everything that I need to improve upon, and what is wrong with me, then she’ll tell me how much she loves me and doesn’t want me to change.

I know this is the bi-polar talking. What I need to know is: How do I approach her about getting some help? She’s miserable. I’m miserable. She knows she has a problem, she sees how well I handle myself after treatment, but if I bring it up, she shuts down. She also shuts down on so many other things that I hardly know how to start a conversation with her anymore. I need to know how to talk to her when she sits with her arms crossed on her chest, and her lip thrust out like a little kid. I realize that you don’t have a degree in psychology, but neither do I. I also have the added disadvantage of being previously very passive. I don’t have a lot of experience in approaching people in tricky situations. She needs help, and while I know she has to agree to get it, I feel that she needs a wake-up call, and that I’m the one that she needs to hear it from. I’d really appreciate any advice that you can give me, Sars; I’m getting to the end of my very short rope.

Frustrated, and bewildered in love

While engaged in a spirited dialogue about nursery decorations (don’t ask), my roommate mistakenly grouped Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy in with the Sesame Street characters. I say Kermit and Piggy were created by Jim Henson (which she doesn’t dispute) and never appeared on our beloved PBS children’s show. She swears they did. We come to you and throw ourselves at the altar of your King Solomon-like wisdom. Your decision binds. Whoever’s wrong has to pay for dinner next time at our favorite Chinese restaurant, so you can see the stakes are extravagant, considering we’re poor college students.

Yes, I know this isn’t one of those “oh, god, my boyfriend cheated on me with my brother and I’m pissed” letters, but we figured that someone who knows as much about television as you do would know the answer.

Sign us,
Perplexed in Pittsburgh