As the person responsible for nearly every tweet and Facebook post to come from The New Republic's accounts, I've made my fair share of grammatical mistakes. An accidental "it's" instead of "its". A mildly garbled sentence. Some particularly egregious subject-verb disagreement. (Thankfully, I've never left the "l" out of "public".) It's occasionally embarrassing, but I can usually shrug it off. After all, I'm not the only one who has accidentally made up a word (remember the Bush presidency, anyone?) or mixed up the whole alumni/alumnus/alumna/alum-whatever situation. But, boy oh boy, do some readers feel the need to correct my every stray comma (and sometimes try to correct my already correct language). Thus, I've become a pro at biting my proverbial tongue. It would be gratifying, but ultimately fruitless, to fire back a tart response at every Tom, Dick, and Sally who wants to lord their superior knowledge over me. But last night, when this video blew up on the front page of Reddit, my prayers were finally answered. Stephen Fry has come up with the smartest, wittiest response to the grammar pedants I've ever seen.
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