My name is Floyd, and I...am a grammar douche. Look, I'm going to have to bug out of here in a few minutes to catch my other 12-step-group, because of how I'm also hooked on phonics.

            The brilliant sitcom How I Met Your Mother had an episode earlier this season in which they introduced the main character's college girlfriend, whom everyone described as a douche, by which they meant an overbearing pompous know-it-all. She's the kind of person who knows all the vineyards in a particular region of Bordeaux and laughs at you if you order a merlot. Who goes to films. Who for gawd's sake knows the difference between an armoire and a goddamn dresser.

Yeah, I'm kind of that way about grammar.

I've claimed, trying to explain what I can't seem to help, that it's because I went to graduate school in English, but that's just a hopeless pathetic lie. I know a lot of people with degrees in English and they're not like this. It's as if it actually hurts me when someone splices two sentences together with a comma. I want to physically harm sentences where the subject and verb disagree. It's not all--or even mostly--about correctness; it's also about elegance and expressiveness. If the subjunctive were a woman, I'd marry her.

I try--honestly, I do--not to be such a douche. I remind myself that grammar is a social construct, that dangling a modifier is not as bad as Michael Jackson dangling a baby off a balcony. A perhaps overly-heavy reliance on the passive voice does not make one ipso facto evil or even slightly naughty. As Vampire Weekend so aptly puts it, "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?"

I do. God help me, I do. I give a fuck about an Oxford comma, and about when to use an ellipsis; I give a fuck about when to use parentheses and when to use dashes. (I'd better; I use a lot of both.) I've dreamt of semicolons. (They're what you're left with after a bowel resection.) If I meet Emily Dickinson in the afterlife, I will fall to her feet and worship her for her use of the dash. (And also because her poetry kicked ass.)

The whole being-a-grammar-douche thing makes people nervous. "Is he judging my writing? Did I forget a comma splice?" (Yes, and yeah, you did.) But I get style; I get that you may know the rules and ignore them; I do it myself, all over the place. It'd be a boring-ass world if everyone wrote in Standard English all the time everywhere. I like prose that sounds like conversation, with the occasional grammatical tic thrown in for, like, a bit of spice.

And even a grammar douche can come up with some solecisms that, when he notices them later, make his pancreas itch and make him want to pluck his eyes out. (And I am that he, and him is me.) I do--oh, my dear gawd, I do--try to find and correct them before anyone else sees them, because I find them embarrassing as hell, but you know what? I can't find all of them. (Especially when commenting on someone else's posts on OS, where you cannot edit; who the hell thought that was a great idea?) So you'd think I'd just relax, wouldn't you? You'd think I'd just accept, in a grown-up kinda way, that we are an imperfect species, that writing came late in our evolution and that we make mistakes.

Yeah, no.

I flat-out love this language we speak. Perhaps, had I been born German or French I'd feel the same way about those languages, but when I learned them, it was not much different from learning the computer languages I work and have worked with: they seemed to me artificial and dry, and to my great sadness, I remember very little of either and never really got good enough at them to see the poetry. But English...English is huge and silly and ridiculous and taunts and tantalizes you with stupid rules that make no sense, that change constantly and that you sometimes have to break to make your point--or just to make your point better. It's like the craziest person you ever loved; you'll spend your life figuring it out, and it'll keep surprising you even after you think you've got it pegged. The only thing that kind of redeems my shameful douche-iness is that the language is a living thing that I love in my own douche-y way.

 You can't love what you don't know. If you don't know grammar, you don't know English.

And now I really must run to the Hooked On Phonics group. If you're late, you miss the Bavarian Cream doughnuts.