I am, by trade, an editor. I proofread and copyedit until my brain runs out my ears, because it comes naturally to me and I I find it fulfilling. How many people can say that about their chosen careers?
There are plenty of people who identify with what I do, people who wish they could walk through life with a Sharpie in their hands to correct every misplaced apostrophe and dropped comma. Many of them refer to themselves, jokingly of course, as "grammar Nazis" or sometimes the "grammar police." Other people use the terms when talking about a friend or acquaintance whose constant corrections drive them up the wall. (And with good reason: science found that "less agreeable people are more sensitive to grammatical errors.")
I used to be among the first camp, those who were proud of their unwillingness to use anything but proper spelling, capitalization and grammar, no matter what the circumstances. I wore the title as a badge of honor, in a joking way of course. Today, I look back on my younger self and cringe. Here's why:
The use of the word "Nazi" for anything other than WWII-related discussions is wrong. Full stop.
My boyfriend is Jewish, and I didn't realize how much that word permeated our culture, and how its use affects people who still feel the effects of the Holocaust, until I began dating him. He'll brush it off, tell you it's not really a big deal — but it is. It's a subtle way to say, "I don't care about the suffering of millions of your people as much as I care about my ability to use this word, which refers to the people who inflicted that suffering, in casual conversation to describe myself." The use of the term "grammar Nazi" minimizes the pain and suffering of the millions killed in WWII and likens that terrible, racist, xenophobic hatred to the feeling you get when you see someone using the wrong there/their/they're.
When you use the term "grammar Nazi," there is no "I'm joking, of course." In one breath, you're saying that people need to be more careful with their language; in the next, you're distancing yourself from your self-identifier? You can't have it both ways. Either you care about your language usage or you don't.
The other part of the equation is the pedestal we have placed spelling and grammar on as a culture.
When we raise up certain voices and cast others down solely for the way they use language, we are doing language a disservice.
Do we communicate using language the same way that Shakespeare did? What about Dickens, or Chaucer? No, because language is a beautiful, fluid thing that adapts to the culture as it changes.
We laud Shakespeare for his "invention" of "over 1000" words and phrases we still use today (ignoring the fact that he didn't actually invent all of those words. No, really.) At the same time, we ridicule people today who use words like "on fleek" and "bae," referring to them as "dumb," and we get upset when words like "selfie" are added to the dictionary. Again, you can't have it both ways! Words will come and go, and just because you don't like them or have need to use them doesn't mean they aren't filling a linguistic gap for another group of people. Shakespeare invented words the same way that young people of color are doing right now. That's the magic of language.
The most important thing you need to know about communication is this: it is not about what you're saying. It's about what other people are understanding.
When someone makes a spelling mistake or a grammatical error, and you can still understand them, they have accomplished their communication. That's it. As an editor, I do enjoy making sure that thing are "correct," for a given definition of correct. What is written "correctly" in AP Style, the journalistic way, may be completely wrong in MLA or Chicago formatting. There is no one, true way. My job is to make sure that writers are adhering to the given rules for the format.
Language is fluid and communication is about getting the message across. It's not about how people communicate, it's about what they're saying. We need to make sure we're prioritizing the correct things. The way I write academically is different from the way I write Odyssey articles is different from the way I write Facebook posts is different from the way I write on Twitter and Tumblr. And all of the ways I choose to communicate can be correct, if they're understood by the reader and follow the guidelines for the method of communication. Some methods are strict, like academic papers, where spelling and grammar have a measurable impact on how seriously I'm taken; others have few guidelines, like Twitter, where the only thing that counts is my characters.
People who arrogantly try to force everyone to stick to only the rules which they believe in, no matter what the format or medium, are not paying attention to the ways that language adapts over time.
We live in an age of total communicative overhaul — the ways humans have been sharing their thoughts and ideas has been changing ever-more-rapidly since the turn of the last century. We've gone from letters to telegraphs to telephone to computers in less than 150 years, and I'd say that we're doing all right, linguistically.
(And I haven't even touched on the racism inherent to forcing non-native English speakers, or native speakers who grew up within a dialect like AAVE or Cockney, to conform to the hundreds of arbitrary, confusing rules that "proper" English doesn't even follow. It's a terrible language to learn! It doesn't make sense! You cannot belittle a non-native speaker for not understanding our spelling and grammar, because how many of us understand our spelling and grammar?)
(Neither have I talked about how demonizing people for their typos is a thinly-veiled ad hominem attack on their intelligence. Or the inherent classism. Or the elitism of many grammar snobs. But for all of that and much more, read Chandra McCann's excellent article, "Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet.")
I'm not saying that we should totally abolish grammar and spelling conventions. I'm saying that conventions are not the same thing as rules, and not all conventions apply in every setting. If there's a typo in a headline or a sign in a store window, that's one thing; we should care about language when writing in a professional and/or public setting. But a typo in a Facebook post or Craigslist listing doesn't really matter, as long as you understood what was being said.
