Talking of grammar Nazism reminds me of this one instance from when I was back in high school. I just walked into my home after school and there was a balding man on the sofa with tea and biscuits served on the table and I instantly started praying that this shouldn’t be some relative who decided to catch up after years and by catching up meant staying four nights at my home. I hadn’t seen that ostentatious man and that beer belly before and mom introduced him to be my grandpa’s-cousin’s-wife’s-brother’s- I don’t remember where it ended. After exchanging greetings, he started telling us about his life at Canada (or “Kanneda” as he called it).

He said, “I wanted to attend to the wedding but couldn’t went..” I couldn’t help but interrupt, “Couldn’t go. You don’t use second form of word with ‘did’.

This happened a few times till my mom excused us into the kitchen and gave me an earful about how disrespectful and mean it was of me to correct him like that multiple times. It was that day I realized that it had gotten into my habit because every time I corrected him, it was instinctive and involuntary. It wasn’t long before my friends and family started regarding me as a ‘Grammar Nazi’.

I am a person who'd get irritated by the wrong use of “your” and “you’re”, “there” and “their”, wrong placement of apostrophes and someone who’s turned off when someone I find attractive lacks proper grammar. I advise people to use “grammarly” all the time and most of my social media comments on people’s statuses are nothing but grammatical corrections.

I came across this article by The Daily Mail some time ago wherein they wrote that studies reveal that Grammar Nazis are introverts and disagreeable people. I don’t believe in generalizing but every point they made was true for me. That was probably that day I started believing that I am one of the Grammar Nazis.

Being a Grammar Nazi isn’t something done to belittle people (unless in an argument, obviously.), but is done with a sub conscious instinct. 99% of the time, I feel compelled to correct spelling and grammar without being aware of it. It’s like an OCD, if I see an error my brain just snaps and I need to correct it right there. I just cannot seem to put my red pen away and ignore little errors that might have crawled in.

It wasn’t long before the people around me started getting irritated at me and I had to keep myself alert to not even unconsciously correct grammatical errors in everything I came across. I started with controlling my habit of marking errors in the books or articles that I read and curbing my urge to correct typos in the text messages people sent me.

I realized that I’ve somehow grown more patient towards people too. However, it has not made any difference to my love for correct use of language but has certainly made me tolerant towards grammatical mistakes and helped me hate myself a little less whenever I happened to make some error.