If your grammar skills aren’t becoming to you, you should be coming to us

Posted on | 3 years, 9 months ago, just before lunchtime | No Comments

Last night The Helvetica Quartet* won second place in a pub quiz, and today we proudly sport our victory trophies — alcohol-themed tee shirts. Mine is a kicky baby-doll number with a Jameson logo splashed across my boobs. Do I drink Irish Whiskey? Generally speaking, no. But I do look smashing in a good emerald green, so I’m pleased all the same.

I’m really enjoying these quiz nights, but this most recent installment of trivia and strife may have cost me a little faith in the process … even though I understand that the M.C. had no way of knowing that — lurking within the seething throngs of cheerfully drunk trivia aficionados — she had a small table that was populated with grammar pseudo dominatrices.

I say “pseudo” because it’s like this: having a well-versed and thorough understanding of correct grammar does not mean that any given one of us is (necessarily) likely to use it. We aren’t the sort of folks who go around with red pens, correcting the spelling inside bathroom stalls; and we aren’t even the kind of people who can remember, off the top of our heads, the rest of that whole “i” before “e” except after “c” rule.

Nay. We are the kind of dorks who find it damn near hilarious to talk out loud in LOLCAT. So let it not be said that we are Accuracy Nazis when it comes to English language usage.

HOWEVER. As we learned last night, if you sufficiently liquor up a woman with a master’s degree in that subject who furthermore writes for a living, and then you try to dock her team points over a correctly deduced apostrophe misfire, then by God you’d better be prepared to run faster and climb higher than a drunkenly irate author with a belly full of hard cider and jalepeno poppers.

It was not my finest hour.
But. For the record.

Correct: The trivia question and its potential answers were unclear at best.
Incorrect: Cherie chewed on the M.C.’s microphone and it’s stand.

Correct: This is about honor. It’s not about inebriated indignation.
Incorrect: Well, I got this question off an English website so its right.

Correct: Use that excuse all you want, but it’s not going to cut it at the MLA.
Incorrect: But its just a trivia question. Its no big deal!

Correct: Of course it’s a big deal! There are free tee-shirts at stake!
Incorrect: Fine. I guess its a bad question and we’ll throw it out.

Cherie: Wiktory!
M.C.: (mutters) Jesus H. Christ in a chicken bucket …


* Me, Aric, Ellen, and Maudelynn.

Category: misc

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