9 Wonderful Grammar Stories for Language Nerds (like Us!)

it was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. I mean, that's honestly barely half the sentence. It just keeps going and going. So he's basically the king of run on sentences, is what you're saying. Well, yes, but here's what I learned recently, Like, it's no surprise that Dickens rambles, but actually i'd heard that it was because he was getting paid by the word. Yeah, I mean he wrote those

serialized novels and magazines, so that kind of makes sense. Right. Well, I read something this week that his books like Bleak House were actually based on total sales, not on word count. And you know, the reason he was guilty of so many run on sentences wasn't that he was trying to rack up the money. It was because he was using the language to satirize how pompous people of the era spoke. And that's just the first of nine stories we've got

today about language and grammar. So let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass wearing a shirt that has five commas and a lizard on it, I'm trying to figure out what Oh, I get it? Okay, common comma, common common comma, you get it? Yeah? Actually, christ And told me about the shirt. You got it

when you found out that you were really into boy Joy. Uh. Such a nice guy, and I think he's probably on the triple digits in the number of T shirts he's worn in honor of our episodes. Now, but that's our

friend and producer Tristan McNeil. So I actually want to kick this off by saying I like grammar jokes, uh, you know, eat shoots and leaves the comma citra stop grammar time Like, I love these jokes, and we've printed tons of them over the years, But I actually think my cousin Shannup, who is brilliant, might have written one of the cleverest grammar jokes of all time. You want to hear it. Of course, I'll never turn down a

good grammar joke. Manga. So there's a guy who has a stomach pain, right, and he goes to the doctor and he's howling and he's complaining, and the doctor checks him out and he tells them, look, this isn't good. You've got a severe problem here, and there are only two ways to treat it. I could take out half your colon or I could give you medicine, but you're going to be chronically constipated. What do you want to do?

And so the guy thinks about it and thinks about it, and he says, just go ahead and take out half my colon. And the doctor goes, why do you choose an option? And he says, because I prefer a semicolon to a full stop. I think I saw where that would go, and that's pretty good. Yeah, it's a cute joke, right, and you don't get cute jokes about grammar and constipation at the same time. It's true it's hard to come by one of those. All right, well, let's move on

to some facts. That was a good joke. But why don't I start us off with the bank Sea of Punctuation. And this is a grammar vigilante in England who goes around fixing apostrophes. And I know that sounds weird, but he does this like in the cloak of darkness, like a true superhero, fighting bad grammar with the help of his trusty apostrophiser. As he says, So what is an apostrophiser? Well, it sounds fancy, but it's actually just a broom handle with two sponges where you can play stickers to cover

up apostrophes or like put them in phrases occasionally. And he's been doing this for about a decade. And he also uses a scalpel and tries to be very neat about it. But apparently people have very mixed feelings about his work. Some of course, applaud the correction of grammar around town, and others, you know, mostly shopkeepers. They're kind of upset because you know, they've got to either replace the signs or live with the occasional bad sticker job.

And what about when people say it's vandalism or or like it's a crime to do this. Well, he has a response to that. He's actually gone on record saying the grammar mistakes are the much bigger crimes here. That is a bold stance. But but what's interesting to me is that your grammar Banksy isn't the only grammar vigilante out there. I read this great story of these guys in two thousand eight, who'd I think graduated from Dartmouth, and then they set out on this great American grammar hunt.

And they called themselves TEAL, which I guess stood form the typo Eradication Advancement League, and they kind of had a similar mission. So the newspapers described their road trip across America as part Kerouac, part grammar Nazi, just fixing signs and store windows wherever they went. And it went mind for a while, like they went through a number

of states. But when they got to the Grand Canyon, they fixed up this sign that had errors, but it turned out to be this historic preservation sign and they got caught and arrested. So what happened to them after that? They actually got banned from national parks for a year and they had to pay about three thousand dollars of fines,

which you know they happily did. But what's funny is that one of the guy's diary entries was used in the court case, and this is what it says, quote, I discovered a hand rendered sign inside that I regret to report had a few errors. I know today was supposed to be my day off from typo hunting, but if I may be permitted to quote that most revered of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, always on duty, I

can't shut it off. Will we never be free from the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded by natural beauty like you? He was super entitled, but I was gonna say that sounds pretty entitled. The weirdest thing is that while they widened out a lot of errors, they left one. It was the misspelling of the word immense, which I guess started with an E on the sign. They left that because they would have defaced the sign too much. But one of the guys basically said that

he still has nightmares over not fixing that error. So I'm curious. So do you know why they were so passionate about fixing these grammatical errors? Like was it just for fun or some other mission here? I mean, apparently they got really into grammar after winning these spelling bees in middle school, so they just took it on after that. That's pretty good, all right, Well here's a pretty funny one. So did you realize that Julius Caesar wrote two books

about Latin grammar? So I actually did know this. I remember the fact from our magazine days, along with the story that um, one time Caesar got caught by pirates and they offered this ransom for him, and he thought the ransom was too low, so he increased it. He made them increase it because he felt undervalued. But you were saying he was a grammar fund as well, right, Yeah. And one of the weird parts, like he wrote these books while in battle, and our researcher E's found this

fact that that I love. So whenever Marcus Ralius used to complain that he didn't have time to read, his tutor used to annoyingly bring up that Julius Caesar managed to write a whole book on language, and he was conquering Gaul at the same time as writing this book. I feel like that's when like your mom keeps comparing you to like the goody two shoots down the street, who's so perfect. You know. It's like Caesar could write a book while he was in battle. You can. So

here's a quick one I hadn't heard. Apparently, in nineteen four, Winston Cigarettes debuted this new filter tip cigarette and it had the slogan Winston tastes real good like a cigarette should, right, And it wasn't controversial because of this filter tip or or how tasty cigarettes are? You know, it was pushing

this idea that cigarettes can be so tasty. People actually disliked the slogan because it was ungrammatical and grammar slaves didn't appreciate use of the word like when they should have been using as I guess and I got this from adage. But one famous author at the time, this guy John Mason Brown, did a twenty minute rent on air and said it caused him physical pain to hear

the slogan. But then he ended his bit by pulling out a Winston from his pocket, lighting up and saying, but I think the cigarette is great, right right, which feels a little hypocritical. Anyway, the grammar debate got to such a ground swell that Winston actually added a tagline to their tagline, which was what do you want good grammar or good taste? And I'm curious? What did people

want good taste? I guess. I mean this discussion propelled Winston like into the top cigarette spot, I guess, and after just nine months, the brand sold six point five billion of the new cigarettes because they were just so tasty. I guess. It's such a weird way describe something like that. I mean, it is weird that people could get so up in arms about this kind of thing. I mean,

I love how passionate they are. Yeah, but I mean, like, I don't understand that type of grammar issue, right, Like it sounds good to the ear, sounds pleasing enough people understand you. You know, I understand grammar for the most part. But um, I also like breaking the laws of grammar take great pleasure in that. So, so, where where do you want to go from here? I feel like we should go from tasty cigarettes to the animal Kingdom and

specifically the Bengal finch. Now, the Bengal finch needs strict syntax to communicate. And I know that may sound weird, you know, like you think about their chirping sentences, they actually have to be arranged in a certain way in order to make sense. And we know this thanks to this researcher at Kyoto University who took bird calls then jumbled them up and saw how they reacted to these.

So you'd play the four or five songs and and watch when one of the songs was altered and the birds would behave normally for the properly arranged songs and then overreact or act like something was really wrong. When they got the remixed version of these, and it was it was really like it agitated them and they knew something from these was really off. That's really funny. They think like they'd get so flustered by bad grammar or just totally used by it. But you know, I found this,

uh crazy thing. It's from this BBC story on this book The Elements of Eloquence, and it actually says that English speakers have this unwritten rule that we use for adjectives and basically to understand each other. We have a

specific order in which we communicate our adjectives. And I had never thought about this, but like when you string them together, it goes opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, and then the noun, right, And that's so weird because like you don't think about classifying things like that, but it's kind of like a please excuse my dear aunt Sally for words, and in practice it actually makes sense, Like you'd unconsciously say something like big black dog, right

like size before, color before now instead of black big dog, which just kind of makes me sound like an idiot, right, You sounds so dumb when you said that. You know that black big dog. And the folks example is even longer, so like that they're showing you how like if you say something like, uh, the lovely little old rectangular French whittling knife and that phrase, if we're saying that to one another, you do get a sense of what I'm saying because you sort of understand the order in which

I'm going to describe something. That is amazing, because I don't ever remember learning anything like that in school, at least in to that degree of specificity. It is all just what makes sense to our ear. You know, yeah, I guess. So, all right, we've got two more facts to go, but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking grammar and language. So will what's your last

back going? Maybe? All right, what I think I'm going to talk about the sark mark, which is a new punctuation market. It was created to show sarcasm. And the reason I like the market it kind of looks like the AT sign with a point in the middle, is because you know, people don't often understand jokes and text, and this is a way to communicate that. And you know, I guess now that we have emojis and winks to

show that we're kidding. But the creators, these guys, Paul and Douglas Sack of Shelby Township, Michigan, they wrote on their website quote, in today's world, with increasing commentary, debate and rhetoric, what better time could there be than now to ensure that no sarcastic message, comment or opinion is left behind. It feels like they could have used a stark mark at the end of that sentence. I think probably so, yeah, But I mean, you think about it.

It could be useful, especially end like your boss is joking with you, or someone empowered like a politician. You know, it would be super helpful in those instances. Oh, definitely. And it's funny because the Sacks copyrighted and trademark their sign. But it isn't the only one out there. There are lots of other fun punctuation marks, like the snark mark, which isn't copyrighted, the rhetorical question mark it kind of

indicates questions you don't have to answer. You've got the authority mark, and even the love point, which very sweetly has two question marks on one point facing each other to make a heart that is kind of cute. Well, one punctuation point you didn't mention, and I'm lucky you didn't because I actually wanted to end on. This is the in Taro bang and it's the exclamation point over

a question mark. And it was created by this copywriter, a guy named Martin Specter, who thought, you know, it didn't look very sleek in print or very professional in print when you use multiple punctuation marks at the end of a sentence, and basically you wanted to be able to use it and add copy like he wrote this phrase, um, what a refrigerator that makes its own cubes, and that was his actual example, and he wanted people to be able to use these interro banks, both after what and cubes,

So he ran a contest to name his new punctuation mark, and other suggestions included exclaim a quest, the exclarative, and the quiz ding, which I actually kind of but I guess bang is a printer's slang for an exclamation point,

and it also kind of has a nice ring to it. Anyway, what's amazing to me is both how well the interor bank succeeded and didn't because, you know, while no one uses it today, it was an actual key on a lot of typewriters in the sixties and seventies, and there was even this upside down version of it created called no barettni and uh, I guess that's just intero banging backwards and it was made to be used in Spanish sentences. Oh,

that's pretty cool. You know, I was familiar with the Intero bank, but I actually didn't really lies that it was on keyboards that long ago. That's pretty cool. Yeah, all these beautiful Smith Corona typewriters actually, well, I kind of want to give you the trophy today, but I don't know. It takes guts for Tristan to be walking around with that terrible karma chameleon. So I feel like, you know, he did this for me, knowing I was a boy George fan. He might be mocking me. You

never know what Tristan. He never really lets onto whether he is or not, So I kind of feel like I want to give the trophy to him. Are you okay with that? That sounds fine to me. Awesome and thanks to Eves jeff Cote for her brilliant research as always, and thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow