After being told that graffiti is illegal, and that two wrongs don’t make a right, the grammarian said, “actually double negatives are ungrammatical.”
Photo by: Katherine Wood
The Punctuation and Elocution Defenders Against Nefarious Terminology (PEDANT) has suffered an internal schism in recent months, as members argued over the question: should they attempt to “reclaim” the term “Grammar Nazi?”
Jason White, the new chair of PEDANT, has supported members describing themselves as “Grammar Nazis.”
“‘Grammar Nazi’ has been used against us as a term of abuse as too long, and has become a slur,” White said. “We’re reclaiming the term. We are Grammar Nazis and we’re proud of it!”
Dick Spencer, who advocated for White’s leadership, likes the term as well. “We do like grammar, and we are… ” he said, before cutting
himself off. When pressed to clarify what being a “Grammar Nazi” meant to him, Spencer grew enraged.
“Just because I call myself a Grammar Nazi doesn’t mean you can,” he shouted. “Just because I now carry a flag everywhere that has a swastika made of semicolons and all my T-shirts say ‘Pure English is the Best English’ doesn’t mean you get to say I’m a Nazi!”
The argument illustrates a deeper divide within PEDANT. Two years ago, PEDANT expanded its membership to include linguists. Previous acceptable categories included English teachers, “grumpy old white men,” and those who could provide at least three examples of harassing people online about the distinction between “your” and “you’re” or “there,” “their,” and “they’re”.
No known linguists support reclaiming the term Grammar Nazi. They also advocate for loosening PEDANT admission criteria, officially acknowledging the science of semantic shift, and recognizing and celebrating all dialects of English. The population of linguists is significantly more diverse than the rest of PEDANT, which linguistics grad student Isabelle Alvarez attributes to “the fact that we’re not racist and sexist dicks.”
“Linguistics is an actual science, not a matter of complaining about people who don’t sound like you,” Alvarez said. “Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. These dudes wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they couldn’t tell people they were doing it wrong.”
White opposes the inclusion of linguists. “People who speak like that want to dilute the purity of the grand old English language, with its proud lineage stretching back to Anglo-Saxons,” White said. Some of White’s staunch supporters started a website recently, a splinter group from PEDANT, where linguists are not welcome. The faction’s website “Grammar Nazi Pride” gives its official mission as, “to promote a pure and unsullied English, free of foreign words and inferior constructions such as split infinitives.”
“We are aware White hates us,” said Jamelle Tubman, an Assistant Professor of linguistics, whose research focuses on historical linguistics, “but the focus on Anglo-Saxons is particularly odd, since half of English comes from the French, including words like ‘purity’ and ‘superiority,’ which they seem particularly fond of.”
The PEDANT splinter faction maintains a list of grammatical constructions they consider unacceptable, the majority of which stem from African American Vernacular English, such as copula deletion, which is found in sentences like “He racist.” While AAVE has been recognized as a grammatically consistent dialect for decades, the text of the website suggests it hasn’t been updated since the 1950s.
The Grammar Nazi Pride website goes further, with another list of unacceptable words. Most are loanwords, words borrowed from another language which have since been incorporated into English, which the website refers to as “illegals.” It includes terms such as “schmuck,” “halal,” “boba,” and “quesadillas.”
“And, to top it all off, they ordered tacos at the PEDANT meeting last week,” chimed in Alvarez, shaking her head in seeming exasperation. “If they hate loanwords so much, they should stick to eating shitty British food. Goddamn Grammar Nazis.”
Written by: Jaz Twersky, MQ alum, MQ cool aunt, and former copy editor.
