Are you a grammar nerd?

Does the term "grammar nerd" describe the way you think about language correctness?  If you are unsure, you may want to test yourself on these signs from Grammarly (available on Facebook and Twitter).

As much as I hate to admit it, I checked off nine of the ten signs.  (I had to look up No. 6, "what an Oxford comma is," and yes, now I have an opinion about the Oxford comma - completely unnecessary.)  

The realization that I act like a grammar nerd clashes directly with my image of myself as a linguist, that is, a person interested in studying human speech.  Linguists scoff at those who spend their lives slavishly following what are known as prescriptive grammar rules. 

Prescriptive grammar rules are rules for the "proper" use of language.  They generally appear in written form in grammar textbooks, editing manuals, and can be heard coming from the mouths of English instructors and diligent parents of young children. A well-known grammar rule (broken every day by countless speakers) is, "Don't end a sentence with a preposition."

Linguists are interested in descriptive grammar rules that are explanations of real language everyday people use.  As a matter of fact, linguists find "errors" fascinating. They are interested in what people say and how they say it, not in order to correct it, but to learn more about how language works in the human brain.    Somehow that goal seems more worthy of my efforts than fretting about the use of a double negative, for example.  After all, how would the Rolling Stones sound if they belted out, "I can't get any satisfaction"?  A bit wimpy, I think

So even though I occasionally get a strong desire to dig down in my purse for a red pen and circle an "it's" used as a possessive (as in the incorrect *"The city had it's problems." Shocking, don't you think?), I will take a linguist's view and consider the usage interesting.  Let's investigate.  

In English, we use an apostrophe s to make a singular noun possessive.  We say "Mary's trombone, John's saxophone, and the child's trumpet."   Because our brains are constantly creating grammar from the language we use, a logical generalization of the possessive rule would be to put an apostrophe s on "it" to show that "it" owns something. The problem arises because "it" is a pronoun, not a noun, and belongs to the category of words like "his," "hers," and "theirs," which all indicate possession without the apostrophe. An added difficulty is that "it's" is already something else in the language - a contraction for "it is."  

The English language is constantly changing.  It is like shifting sand beneath our feet.  Who knows if in the future so many English speakers will decide that they want to use *"it's" to show possession that it will become the standard form.  It may make some of us nervous, but it could happen, you know!