on language, snobbery, and racism

This post is brought to you by Somebody Was Grammatically Wrong On The Internet.

I’m gonna try to keep this short <– this is my caveat emptor concerning the fact that I am not going to cover all the bases in this little essay. Essaylet. Whatevs. Anyway, I’m warning you, Gentle Constant Reader, not to expect a War & Peace treatment from this trifold pamphlet.

Many moons ago, back in the Dark Ages when the ice was on the ground, I was a 17-year-old US-American growing up in Germany. I spoke English at home and German at school, and my life was a hodgepodge of weird. (Still is, but that’s another story and shall be told another time.)

One day, as my English/Lit/Humanities/Journalism/Drama-teacher mom was driving me somewheres, I told her an anecdote from my day about an uncomfortable encounter with I-don’t-remember-who. Of my perception of that person, I said to my mom, “I didn’t know how to gauge their reaction.”

I was being very serious. My mother, who is not given to giggling, giggled.

I had read the word “gauge” many a time, as I had already been a book nerd for longer than I could remember. I had also heard the word “gauge,” as I was hearing English spoken around me on a daily basis.

I had not, however, connected the word spelled g-a-u-g-e with the word that, when spoken, rhymes with “cage.”

Therefore, as I related to my mother this anecdote of an uncomfortable encounter, I pronounced “gauge” to rhyme with “dodge,” thereby eliciting her giggle-ing.

At 17, I was, of course, monstrously offended — and pretty damn mortified at having made such an error. After all, I wasn’t known as “The Walking English Dictionary” at school for nothin’. I was also a grammar and pronunciation prescriptivist, although I didn’t know to call myself that yet. I also, however, already had a pretty well-developed sense of self-deprecating humor, so it didn’t take long for me to let it go and laugh at myself.

About “gauge,” anyway. I stayed picky for probably another decade but eventually morphed into a descriptivist and found myself a much happier person. (Other changes to self were concurrent with said morphing, surprise surprise.)

Fast-forward to a few years ago, and I read something somewhere that said something like this: “Don’t make fun of someone for not knowing how to pronounce a word they understand perfectly well but have only read and never heard.” And I remembered my mom, who, yeah, did laugh at me — but good-naturedly, not mocking. And I remembered my husband, who in the early years of our marriage rightly took me to task for publicly correcting his pronunciation of a word. And I remembered all of my friends from school decades ago, struggling to make their speaking apparatuses (apparati?) form English phonemes, when all of their muscle memory and neural pathways revolved around German ones. And I remembered my younger self, fluent in German but incapable of understanding the dialect of my best friend’s parents two villages over.

Language is complicated. Language is hard. And an adult who tackles learning a new language owns greater courage and fortitude than a lot of people who think they’ve got the courage to step out of their comfort zone any time.

I used to be a grammar and pronunciation prescriptivist. I used to be a grammar and pronunciation snob. There were a couple of right ways: what I thought of as standard American English; and what I thought of as standard British English, which was probably what my English teachers in German school called “Oxford English.” Everything else, to my snotty little mind, was non-standard, aka incorrect.

Snotty. Snobby. Little, as in, small-minded. I know now that’s who I was. I didn’t have clue then — but to give my younger self credit, as soon as I learned, I changed. Or at least started to. Provided we allow the humbling to take place and stop embracing that monster named Certainty: when we know better, we do better. I gave myself over to a process (which I’m still undergoing some 20 years later) of sitting down and shutting up and listening.

And one of the things I heard was that I wasn’t just a small-minded snob. I was also a classist and a racist.

Realizing that I was/had been a bratty little snot on top of a too-high horse was hard enough. Accepting that I had ingrained classism and racism as well? Those two were a lot harder to swallow, because that was not how I conceived of my Self at all.

Long story short (I said it would be, remember?), an example of my classism was my mockery of the word “ain’t” in place of “isn’t,” and an example of my racism was my mockery of the word “aks/ax” in place of “ask.”

I didn’t know.

I thought I was on the side of Good Communication. I thought I was helping humanity by Supporting Correct Pronunciation, Correct Spelling, And Correct Grammar. Granted, I didn’t go around correcting people by rote — but given half a chance to critique anything, I’d rip it to shreds while complimenting what was “right” about it in the same breath. It’s what I had been taught to do by nearly every teacher I’d encountered. (For instance, my teachers at German school did not hesitate to correct The Walking Dictionary’s German in front of the whole class.) It simply never occurred to me that I was in the wrong. It simply never occurred to me that there might be a kinder, gentler way to be in this universe and actually facilitate good communication between humans.

I had a lot of work to do.

I’m still doing the work and still need to. Just a few months ago, a friend chastised me for my criticism of the grammar on a protest sign. Now, I look back on the me of June 2025 and frown in confusion at who the hell I thought I was in those moments. The grammar police with her priorities out of whack, I guess. In those moments, I was undermining everything we all had gathered to accomplish — and it was humiliating, frustrating, depressing, and convicting for a trusted friend to point that out to me.

Was the sign writer’s grammar “correct”?

Not according to the rules I learned for English grammar — on either side of the Pond.

Did it matter?

Hell no. Because the writer’s wording clearly communicated their intent, and this wasn’t a linguistics classroom.

At best, my criticism was out-of-place, inappropriate, pedantic, and unnecessary. At worst, it was elitist, classist, and downright mean. It was born of my own anxieties and insecurities, which I would’ve done better to express honestly to the people who love me, rather than bottling up those insecurities and shooting them at an innocent target.

I’m just glad the person carrying the sign was too far away to hear me. So the only hurt feelings were my own pride and maybe the dismay of the two beloveds I word-vomited in front of.

Sometimes, there is grace for even me.

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I started writing this essay because Someone Was Wrong On The Internet. Scanning a forum for inspiration for a short story I’m working on, I came across a comment containing a malapropism. Past Courtney would’ve immediately taken to social media to share the phrase and its correction, as well as lament the general drop in literacy among English speakers, blah blah prescriptivist emergency blah. And then I would’ve sat back with satisfaction as the “likes” poured in.

I might be okay to note the malapropism here and monologue on how I think it came to be and what the correct version is and where that correct version came from historically. But I don’t think I’ll do that. Because this essay isn’t about how that person was wrong on the internet.

It’s about how I have been wrong on the internet — and in many, many other places.

I’ll be wrong again. It’ll happen, because there’s always more growing to do. I will never have reached the perfect state of Descriptivist Oneness. I’ll ever keep learning and changing and realizing where I’ve screwed up and doing better as I’m able.

I might even use wrong grammar or misspell a word along the way.

Gasp and egad.

XOXO

P.S. I still have only to look at my mom and say “/ɡɑd͡ʒ/” for both of us to dissolve into laughter.