Nerds Unite!

Ok, so I'm just going to come out with it from the start. I am a huge nerd. There's really no way around it. If you didn't already know that about me, this post was going to out me anyway. I have gone through various stages of nerd-dom in my life, each as satisfyingly nerdy and fun as the last. You see, I embrace nerd-dom. It's so much fun!


Only when you can dress up like Professor Trelawney at the age of twenty-something and parade around town, can you feel the true liberation and pure exhilaration nerd-dom offers. These are some of my closest friends and my father. We have Harry, Tonks, Dumbledore, Trelawney (my hair was much bigger, but deflated throughout the evening), Jena from Ravenclaw (I think), Becca from Slytherin (of course), and Bri from Gryffindor. What fun that was!


Of course, there are other stages of nerd-dom that I have gone through as well. High school was all about music. I was the president of the band. I started a handbell quartet. I developed an inexplicable love of Mozart that I cannot shake to this day. At the moment I find myself wearing Mozart socks, given to me by a good friend and true nerd at heart. I took a class on Mozart during the Spring semester of my senior year of college, just to make my undeniable love slightly more legitimate.

In college I slipped into my one true calling, however: Literature. You would be hard pressed to find a twenty-three year old who loves Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque with quite the same passion as I harbor. Tristram Shandy, considered by many to be a long blathering of nothingness, held great joy and humor for me. With the exception of my equally nerdy best friend, no one looked forward to our English senior seminar, Encyclopedic Realism, with the enthusiasm I had. And don't even get me started on James Joyce. I could read Portrait and Ulysses 1,000 times and not tire of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom's ridiculous ramblings. Oh, the beauty.

But I digress. Now I come to the inspiration for tonight's post: Grammar. After getting into numerous "discussions" with one particular writer at Mountain Home, I was accused by said writer of being a grammar snob. Fair enough. It's my job, you know? Well, this writer (let's call him Bill) stopped by the office a few days after one particularly heated comma debate, and tossed a book on my desk.

"Have you read this?"
"No."
"Read it."

And then he walked out. I laughed to myself (despite our differences of opinion regarding parenthetical phrases and adjective phrases, I quite like Bill and respect him a great deal) and put the book off to the side. Just yesterday I saw the book again, and decided to take a look at it.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I have not laughed so hard over a book since the unfortunate "windowpane incident" in Tristram Shandy. I laughed out loud, sometimes maniacally, for hours. I related to it, I suddenly felt not-so-alone in the world. "There are others like you,"this book told me. "It's okay to be a nerd."

So what was this hysterical book, you ask? Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. A book about grammar. A book about the downfall of the English language. And most of all, a book about grammar nerds. As I read about Truss's burning desires to walk around handing out "Unnecessary Apostrophe" stickers to the dreaded "greengrocers" of the world (Apple's Pear's and Orange's for sale), I could not help but relate. You see, I've been there. No matter how much I try to repress the memory, the time that I stealthily erased a misused apostrophe on a Pizza Hut whiteboard haunts me to this day. But Truss told me that it's okay--in fact it's more than okay. It's a great thing I'm doing. Together, grammar nerds will unite and save English punctuation from the hungry jaws of text messages, e-mails, and horrendous internet headlines (GOLD'WATCHFORSAIL**JUST10$*CREDDIT^CARDNU3BERSWELCOM).

It is fast becoming a scary world out there, and someone has to do something about it. And so, in all of my nerd-dom glory, I have taken up the call to be a grammar vigilante: saving the world, one comma at a time.