I’m a Grammar Nazi poser. I think I’m a Grammar Nazi. I want to be one. I arrogantly assume the role of one too often in conversations, but the truth is I’m just a silly little poser in love with her dictionary and thesaurus.
That fact slapped me in the face last night as I ranted on about a letter someone wrote to Glenn Beck, which he dutifully read on-air, scolding him for improper past tense usage of the word “sneak.”
Now, I consider myself an educated, intelligent woman with a rather large vocabulary. I pride myself on proper pronunciation and word usage within a conversation. Okay, let’s cut the the pious crap and get down to it: I’m arrogantly smug when I come up against a word I am sure is being mispronounced, misused or is just plain wrong. I may not correct you in front of everyone, but rest assured I will correct you at some point. And in the meantime, I will (sort of) do my best to hide my snickering behind a well-placed hand over my mouth. I am the Queen of Words. Do not mess with my domain.
Enter the word “sneaked.” Past tense of sneak. Past participle of sneak. The bane of my existence.
From the moment I first heard it (which, oddly enough, was not until I moved to the South) I snickered. Paleese people! Learn how to speak proper English. Everyone knows the past tense of sneak is snuck.
Well, apparently everyone forgot to notify AskOxford because they quite chide our American arses for changing their word and thus once again polluting the English Language. They insist that if ever we step foot in merry-old England we simply must not utter “snuck” or we will be exposed for the uneducated dolts we are. The word is “sneaked” thank you very much and we kindly ask you to stop butchering the language we created. It’s not called American, after all, is it? No, it’s called English (please note author’s tongue firmly planted in cheek).
I always thought the British to be a bit stuffy and persnickety when it comes to the English language anyway. I mean, really, these are the people who leave the “the” off of nouns like hospital and university, that can’t spell color, labor or flavor to save their lives and add “r”s onto the end of words like “law” which clearly don’t end in r. Anyone who does that must have serious language issues, don’t you think?
Well, I do. So I went in search of an expert who agreed with me. And I finally found one. Random House’s Maven explains that while the captious Brits are correct that it was not the original or once-correct past tense, “snuck” has snuck into the US lexicon and is today the widely accepted, and sometimes even preferred, past tense form. So there.
The origin of snuck seems to come from the deep South and was first viewed as the vocabulary of the uneducated. A fact I find quite hilarious considering that to me, “sneaked” sounds like the uneducated, preschool version. Of course, I am also the idiot who once severely chided a writer for peppering his script with the word “shooter” because it was “poor English,” and that he would have to “improve his vocabulary beyond the third grade level” if he ever hoped to sell a script. See?? Grammar Nazi poser, arrogance and all. Thank God that both the script submission and the critique were anonymous so neither of us had to suffer the embarrassment of revealing just exactly who the uneducated idiot was.
As I lay in bed last night mumbling curses at the writer of the Glen Beck letter who pulled back the curtain of my Grammar Nazi control booth exposing me for the poser I am and who was now robbing me of blissful sleep, I struggled to embrace this new word that had sneaked up on me….
Nope. Can’t do it. Sneaked still feels like I’m back in preschool.
Lord help me, I’m in vocabulary hell!
This gave me a laugh. I feel about “snuck” as you do about “sneaked.” So, one day a few years ago I looked it up and discovered that both are acceptable in U.S. usage. I still use sneaked.
What I find more problematic than “snuck” is the fast-growing inability to form possessives. Sometimes there are so many misuses of “it’s” that I lose the writer’s thread of thought and have to re-read it. There’s a big problem with “you’re” and “your,” too. Schools evidently don’t teach much of this, and people have come to depend upon spelling checkers that need to include logic checkers too. Can you spell “homonym?” I thought so.
HA! Uh…no. I can’t spell homa—wha?? Actually, that should just be “I can’t spell.” Period.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that when I spell-checked this post, Typepad rejected “snuck” every time in favor of “sneaked”. Betrayed by my own blog! That’s just wrong.
Add to the confusion all the new im-text-chat lingo that’s out there and our language gets muddied up very quickly. Why bother to learn the difference between you’re and your when it’s easier to type ur and be done with it? The teachers are fighting an uphill battle.
A little self-doubt and humility can be a handy antidote in these situations. It’s good to look these things up!
After our ministry opened an office in England and we started doing work there I had to come to terms with ‘amongst.’ It’s strictly forbidden in American English – use among or amid or amidst freely, but never amongst. Yet it is standard English in the UK.
I also had deeply engrained one set of ‘style’ rules that I had to accept were not universal when I sold a manuscript to an outside publisher. ‘Authentic’ uses the Chicago Manual of Style… and spells out numbers up to 100, and drops the Oxford comma (the comma after the penultimate item in a list). Ah, there sometimes IS more than one right answer.
Have you ever read Simon Winchester’s ‘The Professor and the Madman’? I think you’d like it. About the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Maybe I will have you proof read my junk.
Los
I read this then sneaked around a corner to laugh hysterically and then snuck back into the open to hang my head in shame along with your. You, the Queen of Words, flayed by her own subject matter. And me, the Lady-in-Waiting of Words, realizing that while I’m probably as arrogant as you in this regard, I, at least, knew sneaked was valid (though I do tend to use snuck more often). ::snickering::
God love us both, Lu, cuz I think there are lots of our victims who are just now sitting back and thinking, “Yep, karma’s a b*tch.” LOL Oh, well. Lesson learned. Keep the dictionary closer than the ego. 😉
Kat – ROFLMAO!!!! Especially “keep the dictionary closer than the ego.” Dang, that’s harsh. 🙂
Hey Lu, where are you?
Eager to see what’s going on in your head. It’s June!