The Making of a Grammar Nazi

"WITH!!!"

Heads turned at my outburst, but I was used to it. After three years in customer service, my ears still curled when I would hear a phone representative say: Is there anything else I can help you? Like hunting for the lost piece in a nearly-completed 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, I found it excruciating not to supply that last word aloud.

(Of course, since I didn't even know the perpetrators of this gaffe, I could not very well march up to them and bellow in their ear holes. Yet I find it fun to be able to express my outrage even if they have no idea what's up with me this time.)

But there was a time I was able to correct teammates. That led one to ask me how I had become so fanatical about getting the correct grammar, syntax, pronunciation, etc. (We worked for a US-Based client.) I would just tell them it was the English teacher in me (which I had been at one time). Little did they know the dark secret I harbored.

The truth is, my applications at English tutorial centers for Korean students and at the Speech Training departments of the previous call centers where I worked had been continually rejected. Apparently, I was the wrong age. (The tutorial centers minced no words revealing this. Not surprising, since many of them are little more than friendship clubs at best and escort services at worst.) It was the old prejudice against older employees.

But what really ground my gears was that the very people who rejected me - the Filipino interviewers at the tutorial centers and the speech department heads and trainers at my previous call centers - were themselves guilty of multiple counts of Pinoy English. This is the brand of English (grammar, pronunciation, syntax, context and what have you) that many here have come to regard as the standard. The help you with example is one such. To be fair (note that I don't say In fairness or even worse Infairness) my interviewers did not say that, but they did commit such atrocities like taken cared of and the unnecessary article, as in That's a good news. They are so convinced that this is correct because 'everybody' is doing it.

(Apparently, the entire population of the Philippines represents 'everybody', and never mind that we comprise just 1.37%  of the world population.)

So these young punks who feel I'm not good enough to be a speech instructor feel justified saying in-TER-val instead of  IN-ter-val and As what I have said instead of As I've said.

Thus I go into a frenzy whenever I hear this Fag English, and correct it every chance I get. Rightly or wrongly, it's my way of vicariously rubbing their noses in the shit that they are full of.

(Lest I be accused of gay-bashing, let me say that Fag English is committed by people of any gender or sexual orientation. I came up with this name because I associate it with loud, shallow, pretentious and showbiz-obsessed aforementioned young punks, which I call fags, faggots or gaffots. See also my article: Dulling the Gay Blade. I guess that it was loud was the main reason I have come to connect it with these types.)

It is ironic that both the historical Nazis and this Grammar /Syntax/Pronunciation/American English Nazi were products of perceived injustices committed against them.