"I guess so," said the blond ex-tin man in the duster...

[verilyverity]

What is up with the burly detectivism in Tin Man?  Never have I encountered a fandom so dead set on replacing characters' names and pronouns with ridiculous sounding proxies.  And passive voice!  With a verb that takes an object!  How can that even sound right to an author?

ETA: Ye gods and little fishes!  *stares at ballooning comments*

Comments

[blackletter]

a whole lot of it from people who claimed to have dyslexia and who apparently believe that excused them from ever being expected to write comprehensibly

Heh, I have mild dyslexia, and it never stopped me from paying attention to the spell-check squiggles. (Just don't ask me to distinguish "how" and "who".)

several people claimed to have been educated in the U.S. and further claimed to have NEVER BEEN TAUGHT GRAMMAR. Some actually said that "grammar isn't taught in schools here anymore."

I'll go on record as another person who wasn't taught a lick of grammar in public schools. It wasn't until I started taking Latin (sophomore year of college) that I learned what a direct object was. Before then I was an osmosis writer.

But the funniest "grammar? what grammar?" story I know involves my best RL friend. She's an English grad student. While she was getting her BA, she decided to take a class in English grammar. (She, too, didn't have any grammar instruction in the public schools and was getting jealous of my new-found mad grammar skillz.) The grammar class was taught out of the Linguistics department. The credits did not count towards her English degree. It was counted as an elective. That's right, the university didn't think that grammar was necessary, or even desirable, for an English BA.

Bladekid is very lucky. Most Latin students I teach have never had any grammar instruction (which means, as amedia said, we Latin teachers end up spending a lot of time teaching English grammar). I know only two college age people who can actually diagram a sentence. One of them is the afore mentioned English grad student friend who took a grammar course, the other was home schooled. I can't diagram. Years of foreign language means that I can talk about grammar, but I don't know the diagramming conventions/symbols. And this is true of most of my peers in classics--and language is what we do!