When I was in middle school, I took pride in what I was naturally good at doing. So did everyone else, OK. But for me, it wasn't sports or science.

My special skill, the one that I never needed to practice, the one that I always brought into every possible conversation was... drum roll...

Grasping grammatical rules and doing well on stuff like spelling tests.

Wow, so exciting. But don't pretend you haven't met a grammar nerd before. They are a real thing. Some call them grammar Nazis, although that's a bit heavy-handed for my lexicon. A grammar nerd would excel at being an editor. A grammar nerd would work hard to purge their daily speech of dangling participles, or of ending sentences with prepositions. A grammar nerd would watch Weird Al's "Word Crimes" video more than once.

I am an editor for Odyssey, and I was editor-in-chief of my high school's literary magazine. I can find grammar editors with the utmost ease. But when "Word Crimes" came out, I didn't really like it. Today, I wouldn't want to identify as a grammar nerd at all. When a friend sends me a text that says, "Alright," I don't roll my eyes anymore. And I used to be all about correcting that kind of error. What has changed?

Well... I'm a linguist now.

I know that if someone types "Alright" instead of "All right," that's because language allows for it. Language is ever-evolving and beautiful because of it.

The fact that people end their phrases in prepositions is not merely an error. It is a linguistic phenomenon with semantic meaning. The idea that a group of people can make rules about what language is correct and what language is inappropriate... it doesn't sit well with me anymore. I know that if I look down on others for using words that are still unauthenticated by the dictionary, I am doing so with classist, elitist standards as my foundation.

I am a descriptive grammar nerd... but not a prescriptive grammar nerd. And when most people say "grammar," they mean the prescriptive kind. In my introduction to linguistics class, I learned that linguists seek to describe language as it is... not to prescribe rules to govern it. Language is OK the way it is. In fact, it is telling about our society. Why would we want to silence the idiosyncrasies that we subconsciously employ to express ourselves better?

As I became a better writer in high school and dropped the cutthroat prescriptive grammar attitude, I didn't know that I would find a linguist's attitude to replace it. But I'm so glad I did.