Grammar saves lives. No, seriously. One misplaced comma and you’ve gone from “Let’s eat, grandma” to “Let’s eat grandma.” I have made it my mission in life to correct these errors before someone gets hurt, and if I annoy everyone in the process, too bad.

I’ve been what’s commonly known as a grammar Nazi (I prefer the term “grammarian”), since my younger brother started to talk. I don’t remember exactly what he said, or exactly how I responded, but the feeling I got has since become as familiar to me as breathing. It starts in my face, when I feel the rising heat in my forehead and cheeks, and then becomes like a physical pain in my heart. That’s right; it actually pains me when someone misuses the English language. So you can probably imagine how much I enjoy having a younger brother who loves to flout convention by mispronouncing and making up words, and just generally break the hallowed rules of English grammar upon which I have built my life. For some strange reason, he finds it fun, to butcher a language (annoying me is probably a bonus). Worse, he cannot understand why I do not find this funny, regardless of how many times I tell him that ain’t isn’t a word, “LOL cats” is not the place to learn about syntax, and faking a lisp is just mean. It may help to think that I am just as irritating to him as he is to me, but it does not fix the problem at hand: there is a walking grammatical error in the world which I have been unable to fix. And he’s as bitter at me for trying to fix it as I am at him for being one in the first place.

Fortunately for my sibling, there is an entire public who are far worse offenders than he. Land mines are everywhere: the wrong form of its/it’s in a PowerPoint, “me and my friend” doing this or that in the hallway, or sentences ended with prepositions nearly anywhere. Bathroom stall graffiti is particularly bad. (Is it really possible to misspell a cuss word?) Reading is my favorite thing to do, but one awkward sentence, misused homophone, or typo can ruin my day, just as taking a red pen to a poorly worded essay can make it. But worse than the students, the parents, and the substitutes are] the most troublesome offenders: teachers. A majority of educators make just as many errors as others, but due to the nature of our relationship (my grade is in their hands) I am much more reluctant to correct them than I would be others. Thankfully, most respond well, by thanking me and correcting the error, or even better, letting me go through and correct it myself. One teacher (he of the its/it’s presentation) has even offered to give me a copy of the PowerPoint so I can just go through and correct all the mistakes myself.

That cannot be said of the general public. Surprisingly, (or maybe not) most so-called “responsible adults” are not too keen on being told by a teenage girl that they really should be using “I” in that sentence, or that “whenever” is not a substitute for “when” (or worse, when you say something “literally” happened, it is necessary for it to have actually happened.) Neither are teenagers, but that does not surprise me at all. Most of the time, their response is to huff at me, call me a grammar Nazi (I really do find that term offensive) and maybe even tell me off. It doesn’t matter how our interactions go after that; they will always think of me as the uptight girl who was too rigid to just let their mistakes go. Some see it as a form of disrespect, which it may be. They never respond in the way I would like them to: by simply correcting themselves and moving on. It pains me that they cannot see I’m simply trying to help them. They continue to walk around clueless, oblivious to the fact that one wrong comma and their grandmother could suffer a horrible fate.

Some may say I have a problem. When I read the yearbook this year, I corrected every error in tense and spelling I saw verbally, just for fun. Handouts and pamphlets: beware when I come near you with a pen. When I read about the idea of guerilla correction- going around town and painting over errors on billboards- I clapped with excitement. I find grammatical errors online or in books funny, and think they hurt the credibility of the author. And if the list of names on the back of a shirt isn’t in alphabetical order… watch out. It’s true: I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you, and though it may be hard to believe, I am actually proud of that fact. Being a grammarian is something interesting that defines an otherwise boring life. It takes my need to be a control freak and turns it into something (somewhat) productive. It has even led me to figure out the answer to that age old question: what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be an editor. Then I can correct people’s mistakes for a living, without fear of repercussion from someone who has no idea of the harm that grammatical errors can do. I can change the world, and keep little girls like me from being scarred forever when they read a typo someone really should have caught, and thus figure out that even the best author in the world cannot catch their mistakes every time. I can keep them from ever feeling that all too familiar sensation of heat and pain in their hearts. Maybe I can even be the one to, once and for all, fix people’s broken relationship with the English language, one sentence at a time.