I always feel a little uncomfortable using the word Nazi for anything but a Nazi. My dad fought those actual Nazis in World War II, and based upon what we know those Evil Ones did, it seems almost heartless to use the term for anyone or anything else.
But grammar Nazi is now a term we use to apply to people who insist that Right and Wrong exist in English grammar and usage and punctuation (surely they are carved on some stone tablets somewhere?) and that those who fail to observe those Commandments are, well--let's just say it, all right?--inferior.
I taught English for about forty-five years--grades six through undergraduates--so I have seen a lot of things on student pages that ... startled me. Over the years I marked such things, taught the standard way to say such things, etc. And every year I felt as if I were starting from scratch, even though I knew the teachers in the previous years had pounded away at the same (or similar) things. (I also knew that in the subsequent year my students' teachers would wonder if they'd done a thing in my class!)
A dear former colleague of mine from Harmon Middle School, Penny Wolfe, joked to a class that she'd been teaching them not to write alot for thirty years.* When are they going to get it?
I've lived long enough to notice how things change in grammar and usage and punctuation--and I've written about those things here before. (Example: Teachers used to give us countless worksheets on the differences between will and shall ... that distinction, I believe, is mostly gone.)
Also, I must say that I am humbled because I keep learning things, keep discovering that I've been doing things "wrong" for, oh, a half-century or so. Joyce just told me recently, for example, that when I'm using an apostrophe to indicate the absence of a letter (or of letters), I need to use the apostrophe form that looks like a 9, not the one that looks like a 6.
Example: 'nuff said? (Not 'nuff said.)
I've grown especially mellow in this age of social media. Mistakes are easy to make (I do so all the time) when you're clicking away on Twitter or Facebook. So ... I cut people slack, hoping, of course, that they will do the same for me.
One sort of error that continually pops up here and there actually has a name: hypercorrection. This is a word to apply to terms or phrases we use because we think we're being more correct than what we ordinarily would have said. For example, some people think they should never use Bill and me, so they use Bill and I instead--even when the grammar demands a me: She gave the cookies to Bill and me. (She gave the cookies to me, not to I.)
Okay, here's what I've been leading up to. The other day I finished reading Sue Grafton's latest "alphabet" mystery--Y Is for Yesterday. Her private eye, Kinsey Millhone, usually narrates most of the text, and near the end of this one, Kinsey wrote this:
For my part, having watched Pearl crush the life out of Ned, you might wonder if I feel badly about the manner in which he died, suffering as he did (481).
And there it is--a hypercorrection: feel badly. Actually, the only way you could feel badly is if your sense of touch didn't work properly. Feel is a state-of-being verb (when it means emotion), so it must (in our grammar) be followed by a predicate adjective (bad), not an adverb (badly).
When you're using feel to mean the sense of touch, it is an action verb and can have a direct object or an adverb or whatever after it:
I feel the cloth with my hand.
Because of the injury to my hands, I feel badly and cannot appreciate the texture of the cloth.
So ... that surprised me, Kinsey's hypercorrection. Her grammar and style are usually informal but flawless (at least in my memory; I am not going to go back and read and re-read the other novels to check). And so this hypercorrection leaped out at me and slapped me upside my startled head.
Which shows, I guess, that I'm still an annoying English teacher at heart. (And, yes, I know: I just wrote a sentence fragment: It was intentional! Get a life!)
*This will do--but there are, of course, countless other examples.
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