A 2012 playful creation of self-styled “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, reposted back on the 8th on the Our Bastard Language Facebook page:
(#1)
Yes, of course, it’s garmmra, not grammar, not about the grammar of English at all, but mostly about word choice, and then a lot of spelling and punctuation. (On garmmra, see my 2/22/12 posting “It’s All Grammar” and its successors.) Things like the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and named frameworks of formal grammar(Transformational-Generative Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Gramar, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, etc.) live in another world entirely.
(I do note that talking intelligently about those four-letter words data, they, none, and whom involves quite a lot of stuff from the second world of grammar. Mignon Fogarty knows that, of course, but it’s a lot easier to talk about just picking one word rather than another.)
For comparison to #1, a recent (April 2017) issue of Cosmopolitan:
(#2)
On the creation of #1, from Fogarty’s Quick and Dirty Tips site, “What If Grammarians Had Their Own Magazine?” on 7/3/12:
One day in the supermarket check-out line, I started daydreaming about what a hype-filled, trashy magazine for language lovers would look like. Here’s what I came up with.
… Of course, my book, 101 TROUBLESOME WORDS, is nothing like this magazine. It’s filled with well-researched entries about some of the 101 most troublesome words in the English language — the ones people fight about. I confess, however, that I did pull most of my example sentences from pop culture, just to make it more fun. Grammarians love True Blood, The Simpsons, and How I Met Your Mother as much as everyone else!
(#3) 101 Troublesome Words (2012)
(#4) Its predecessor, 101 Misused Words (2011)
On the author, from Wikipedia:
Mignon Fogarty (born 1967) is a professor of journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a former science writer who produces an educational podcast titled Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, which promotes the proper use of the English language and was named one of the best podcasts of 2007 by iTunes.
xx
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