A Rantastically Great Grammar Rant

I enjoyed reading this rant because of its humor and because the author really doesn't pick on any one person or cast aspersions on any race or class. She is just getting to the heart of the matter and talking about the usage of the term.

http://thingsthatarenotbagels.blogspot.com/2012/04/inane-grammar-rants-with-elise-trying.html

Answering Dunn's Questions

The author writes a blog series on grammar rants. She has problems with their/there/they’re and your/you’re, to name a few. The author thinks that language and communication should be precise but not stodgy, as evidenced by her use of capitalized words and parenthetical asides. The blog page I reviewed was a rant on a phrase from a song lyric. The phrase was “having trouble trying to sleep”. What she says about this particular phrase is that you cannot have trouble “trying” something. You either do the task or you don’t. She reminds us of Yoda's admonishment to young Luke Skywalker, "There is no try, there is only do."

In the author’s mind, there do not seem to be any exceptions to this rule and I cannot see any exceptions, so her claim seems valid to me. She doesn’t really speak of socioeconomic class in her rant. Rather, she points out that the error is in a song that was popular when she was younger and that she got into a heated debate over the issue with her family. The debate continues with no clear resolution in sight. She makes no claims or connections about the race of readers or writers. She makes no claims about the reader’s or writer’s geographical region, yet she does mention that being a grammarian can have social consequences. She points to a Facebook post where the poster has corrected several friends’ usage of the word “you’re”.

The author infers that her readers are intelligent and she speaks to her readers in a snarky, hip, yet sophisticated manner. She makes no blatant claims about ethics or moral character of the song composer who’s lyric she is ranting about. She simply is annoyed that the song was allowed to be written with such a blatant grammatical error.