Fascists and Grammar

Original Post: 30 April 2013
Posted Here: 1 December 2017

While searching for a completely different topic, I happened upon a blog post about Twitter's fifth birthday. It began "Today, Twitter is celebrating what Grammar Fascists are likely lamenting..." The statement made me think of several related topics that we, as writers and as citizens, should keep in mind.

The first took me back over fifty years to my highschool Psychology class. We were studying propaganda. Our text discussed "name calling" as one of the techniques. For some people, name calling begins on the nursery school or kindergarten playground. Regardless of what's been said about "sticks and stones," words can hurt. On the playground, name calling is a form of bullying. As we grow into adults, we employ name calling as a way to convince others that some person or group, unlike ourselves, is wrong, can't be trusted, or is evil. Like "Fashion Police," Grammar Fascists don't exist. But I'd guess that the blogger was trying to convince her readers that people who feel that correct grammar is important are very wrong. After all, when we write or speak, who cares if anyone understands us? My dad used to refer to people who "like to hear their head roar."

The second topic was what has been called Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." In other words, in order to win an argument or to make our point, we resort to name calling involving the most unspeakable names we can think of: If you're advocating something that Nazis would advocate, then you must be wrong, evil, or both. The same is true of using Fascist. After all, we all know how evil the Nazis and Fascists were. Actually, how many people really know what a Fascist is? We know that we fought a war with them (Which one? Who were they?), but that's about it. What we think we know is that if someone is a Fascist, they must be advocating something at odds with truth, justice, and the American Way. I guess those Grammar Fascists are trying to force us to adhere to rules which allow us to communicate in a way that others can understand.

The third topic was that you can't make a second First Impression. My first visit is one of the reasons that I don't patronize Domino's Pizza, Applebee's, or Quiznos. I read somewhere that we tend to form opinions about individuals or organizations based on what we hear first about them: a rebuttal has much less of an effect on our opinion than the lie (or bad name) that we hear first. Think about Donald Segretti's "ratf**king" during the Nixon Presidential campaign or the "Swiftboating" campaign during John Kerry's run for the presidency. We are sometimes advised that the antagonists in our stories should be shown with both good and bad points. Remember to make sure that some bad aspects are presented first in order to set the "bad guy" image in our reader's mind.

So, what does this all boil down to? Well, I hope that you'll keep these things in mind and use, or avoid, them as you write your stories. I also hope that you'll be aware the next time some smootrat tries to pull the wool over your eyes.

Keep reading, keep writing - Jack