"Pen of iron, tongue of fire / tightening the wid'ning gyre ..."
"I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I've had to read my students' first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don't just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there's foam on my chin. I can't seem to help it. The truth is that I'm not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don't have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it's not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one—it's got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I'd be mortified to display about anything else."
— David Foster Wallace, footnote 6 from "Authority and American Usage"
Comments
I want to scream every time I hear (not here) someone justify their (not there or they're) erroneous usage of apostrophe S: "I can never remember when to put an apostrophe s or just add an S..." THEN TAKE A MINUTE AND LEARN THE RULES - IT'S (as in, "it is") NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!!! OMG, yes I just used three exclamation points in a row, that's how crazy it makes me.
"Foam on my chin" made me laugh hard enough to require chewed-chunkage removal from my computer monitor.