Miss Evangeline Pettibone, a strict prescriptivist who has been teaching award-winning English literature and grammar classes at Erasmus Hall High School in New York City since 1977, writes:
Dear Grammar “Genius,”
Your “blog” was recently brought to my attention by two of my better students who, I regret to say, had apparently been taking it seriously.
It is difficult for me adequately to express my distress at your dreadful writing style. The naive young people see it and mistake it for passable English. It sets a very bad example indeed, and it frustrates and undercuts our efforts as educators, upon whom society has placed the burden of elevating our students’ love and appreciation of our beloved English language, as perfected by Shelley, Keats, and the immortal Swinburne.
Your intolerant and dismissive attitude, your fatuous, presumptuous assertions, your willful philistinism and, in particular, your egregious serial solecisms are profoundly distressing. I mention in particular your profligate misuse of the word ”whom,” a pronoun the function and force of which you clearly have no understanding whatever.
I beg you to close down this “blog” of yours, at least until such time as you have successfully completed a serious college-level course in writing.
Sincerely,
Miss Evangeline Pettibone, M.A.
Chair, English Department
Erasmus Hall
New York, NY
Hey listen, Pettibone, your not the boss of English, I know all about you. My friends and me took plenty of your brand of miserable crap back in high school and we should of told you off back then. You gave my friends and I a bellyful what with your “objective passives,” “dangling particles,” and “split propositions.”
I happen to have a God-given insight and feeling for English without haffing to stick my nose into a bunch of books and I also make plenty of dough giving out advice about it, so just get lost you prune-faced old celibate.
Also, I’m very sorry if anyone has been offended by this.
The Grammer Genious
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