[*Ed’s note to Gen Y: that isn’t a typo in the headline. It’s a cool joke, and Lucy explains it further down.]
I think I realised I was different when I corrected the grammar of my extremely attractive barista.
It was a Monday morning; he was frothing milk as we chatted idly about the drunken antics of our respective weekends. All the usual stuff - the people we knew in common, the places we had almost run into each other, the quality of the cocktail jugs at various Sydney locations. He might have been carefully watching the temperature gauge rise on that little jug of milk, but we both knew where the real heat was. Just as I was about to casually invite him to a rock gig he dropped a clanger.
‘Yeah I like World Bar. Dave and me were there last Thursday.’
Instinctively, impulsively, STUPIDLY I fired back.
“You mean Dave and I were there.”
Because nothing says “we should go out” like a grammar check.
He looked at me like I was a three week old sausage roll he’d found wedged into the tread of his shoe, mumbled a ‘“yeah, whatever” and went back to making the coffee. Silently.
It’s a look I get often. As a grammar Nazi I am the irritating friend who corrects Facebook posts from “there” to “their.”
The one who has to hold back facial spasms whenever someone says “youse.”
I am something of a rarity amongst my peers – a 22 year old who adores a well constructed sentence.
As a card carrying member of Gen Y, I am a product of an education system that is more focussed on alliteration and assonance than the basics of adverbs and adjectives.
Somewhere during my schooling (all done at state public schools) we jumped from learning the alphabet, to examining the themes of novels and plays.
The participles and pronouns – in truth the finer points of basic grammar - were lost by the wayside.
Now this isn’t to say I had a poor English education.
Far from it. I had some wonderful and enthusiastic teachers during my years at school. I learned to love and appreciate good literature, I learned to debate and discuss in my essays and by the end I achieved some very good results in my HSC. To put it bluntly I fulfilled everything that the NSW English curriculum required of me.
But where was the grammar? That basic stepping stone schooling that older generations had to go through.
I asked my mother about what her English education was like and she told me all about “parsing,” - basically pulling apart sentences. Examining their structure. Learning exactly what adverbs, verbs, nouns and pronouns were. Getting drilled and tested on it day in, day out.
Sure it’s boring, but so is algebra – and at least it’s a sure bet you’ll need to use grammar later in life.
I’m struggling to remember the last time I had to work out the value of ‘x,’ but I’m always unsure whether it’s meant to be ‘learned’ or ‘learnt.’ Why are we not still taught grammar like this at school?
What’s scary is that in my first year of a journalism degree at University, my lecturer handed out a basic grammar and punctuation test. Unsurprisingly, the entire class performed dismally. We couldn’t conjugate if our lives depended on it.
And what’s scarier is that to a certain degree they do.
Name me an employer who is going to hire a young graduate doesn’t know the difference between ‘it’s’ and ‘its.’
In these times of growing unemployment and job un-security it could be the difference between getting an interview, or having a resume tossed into the reject pile.
I believe it’s time that grammar was brought back into schools, and I believe it should be done quickly – before we start having generations of English teachers who themselves don’t know the difference between a verb and an adverb.
And as for me? I changed coffee spots. The barista might have been hot but I’m hoping there’s someone out there for me that can use prepositions properly as they proposition me.
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