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Imagine a rat that has climbed aboard an opium ship. It has thrown all its tiny rat rules out the window in order to survive. Its tiny rat mind has also been blasted over the horizon because the ship’s opium is leaking into the bilge water and that bilge water serves as the rat’s drinking water, toilet, and mating area.

That rat represents the language we call “English.” It is pointless to pretend that it can be “correct” because the bilge rat has no master. If it adhered to rules — it does not — the rules of an opium-addled rat are pretty malleable.

And yet, if you want to be that type of person who does correct people’s English, you’d better get started you pedantic twerp.

Pedant’s Last Charge

People don’t read, they rarely write, and segments of our society have waged all-out war on education. If you want to be pedantic about grammar, syntax, or similar, you’d better get started while there are still a few fellow pedants around to understand what you’re gassing about.

That’s why we pedants have to pull out all the stops on the figurative pipe organ of our fury and then fling our fleshy bodies down upon all four keyboards, sending forth a blast of rage and getting us punched in the buttock by the choir director.

To do this we have to go back in time. It’s not enough to blame the internet for ruining anything because the internet is too big. We need one person to blame… One person, centuries ago, who ruined it all.

You guessed it. This is all the fault of Johannes Gutenberg. What a clown.

Start Correcting People’s Middle English

I hear you bleat, “Guh, Jim, I can’t correct people’s Middle English. I don’t know what the rules were.” There were none, you daft ewe. Make them up!

Pedantism is pointless anyway. You might as well get your jollies on rules you contrived. That way you can never be wrong. That is, until someone like Johannes Gutendoofus comes along in 1439 and whips a need to standardize spelling and syntax right out of his glutenbergs.

Someone’s using an apostrophe to denote plural? Fine. They don’t understand when to use “I” or “me?” Me don’t give a snort. But they refer to themselves as “I” rather than “Ich?”

Get out your pedant’s blouse, don your pedant’s fez, and introduce them to seven seasons of hell.