
Confessions of a Former Grammar Nazi

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"The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10
So straighten your back. Open your eyes. Brace your shoulders. And cry our, “I will not waste it!”
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Dave and Stacey Hare met at The Master’s College (now The Master’s University) in Santa Clarita, CA. They then went on to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY where they each received their MDivs. Also in Louisville, they adopted four kids from Ethiopia. Their first term on the field they spent learning French and Kwakum. For their first home assignment they each received a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, Bible Translation from the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (now Dallas International University). They currently live in Cameroon, Africa where they serve as Linguists/Bible Translators among the Kwakum (aka Bakoum) people.
Copyright © 2021 Hare Translation Journey
Amen! Thank you for your post. I am a recovering grammar nazi myself. There are times to educate and times to simply communicate. It is vital to know when and with whom we should discuss grammatical errors. Most of the time, it is more important to love the person just as they are and to listen to what they have to say, however they wish to say it. -Melody Nowak
Sure, sure, and lyk, mah bros speek purfekt inglish, so dey don’ need correctin’! L33t, OMG, wow!
I get what you’re saying, of course, but experience shows that Grammar Nazis tend to correct not regionalisms and dialects, but actual bad grammar. One can indeed argue that language changes with its speakers, but why should we tolerate a degradation of language, the likes of which we see in the above example?
In my country, for instance, there is a particular portion of the population that wants to rid our language of words borrowed from Russian, despite said words usually being used with suffixes belonging to our language. Why? It has to do with politics and history. They claim that Russians ruined our culture. This is partly true, yet it is no excuse to start witch-hunts. Especially not when these same people not only borrow words from English, French, and Italian, but even encourage the practice, claiming that said languages are: a) closer to ours (French and Italian being of the Romance group), and b) are lingua franca (French, previously; English, currently). There are several problems with this logic. For one, our language, although it does belong to the Romance group, actually formed as result of a mix between medieval-Latin and various Slav languages (Russian/ Ruthenian, Polish, Serbian/ Albanian). For two, just because English is the current lingua franca, it doesn’t mean that by borrowing words from it, we are automatically going to learn it. For three, word-borrowing is not a problem in itself, replacing your own language’s words with said borrows however, is. An example would be the words ‘lucru’ and ‘serviciu’. Both mean ‘work’, ‘job’ (the former also means ‘object’, as a noun), the latter also means ‘service’. However, in the recent years, more people started using the actual English word ‘job’ instead of these. Why? Is it hip? Is it easier to pronounce a single-syllable word instead of ‘lucru’ or ‘serviciu’? Possibly. But personally, it makes my proverbial gears grind every time I hear it. If ‘job’ is now acceptable, why is ‘rabota’ (Russian for ‘work’) not? Politics. Pure and simple. And it’s not like anyone even ever said ‘Eu ma duc la rabota’ (‘I am going to the rabota’), but people today actually do say ‘Eu ma duc la job’ (‘I am going to the job’). I find the hypocrisy of it all purely disgusting.
Thanks for writing. One of the main issues we are struggling with right now is a resistance to borrowed words. It seems like the Kwakum are afraid that they will lose something if they borrow words from another language. However, English is one of the most powerful languages in the world and we borrow words more than anyone else. I say embrace the borrowed words, make them your own, and let your language be all the richer because of them.