Tuesday, August 30, 2011

New word, maybe?

I was writing a post in a Ravelry thread about an unfortunate e-mail that my department received from a prospective student. (It was a hot mess of misspelling, poor grammar, lack of punctuation, and lack of capitalization).

I remarked: "It made my inner grammarista cry."

Now, I don't know...it could be I read that somewhere and my brain appropriated it and I forgot the source. Or it's also possible it's one of those polyphyletic things that many people come up with at once.

But the word immediately pleased me. ("Grammarista," similar to "fashionista.") A lot of times people use "Grammar nazi" for people who are strict on grammar, but I dislike that because:

a. I don't like for anything except the evil that was national socialism to be associated with nazis. (See: Godwin's Law.)

and

b. Caring about grammar and the proper use thereof does not make one a nazi.

So: "grammarista." Which means one cares deeply about it, likely more than other people do - but there isn't necessarily a negative connotation attached to it.

(Crud. I had forgotten until just now about "Sandinista," which does have political connotations that are negative for at least some, and was probably the origin of the "-ista" suffix. Well, darn it, I STILL like my neologism and will pretend that it is modeled solely on "fashionista." Yes, my instinct was right: World Wide Words gives the origin of the "-ista" suffix. Ah well. I STILL like it better than "grammar nazi.")

1 comment:

CGHill said...

I've always leaned toward constructions like "Word Police," which, to me anyway, add a faint undertone of ridiculousness, possibly offsetting whatever anal-retentive qualities I may have exhibited in grousing about someone's grammar.

"Nazi" is definitely overused, which may be causing it to lose much of its descriptive power.