My wife and I found out a few weeks ago that we are going to be having a baby boy. Since that time, I’ve been busy making a mental list of all of the things I need to teach him about being a man, including how to blow a good snotrocket and how to wear blue socks with black pants.
Then I need to teach him how to properly woo a woman, which is something I know a thing or two about, what with me being an English major and all. English majors, if you didn’t know, have been proven by science to be the world’s single sexiest demographic, thanks in part to our way with words and in part to the fact that we can put total lies into print and make them look like actual facts.
I decided to major in English for the same reason that all young men major in English: zero upper body strength. But I also had a desire to pick up women, and I figured that one way to go about that was to learn the seductive art of language. Because everybody knows that nothing’s a bigger turn-on to a college girl than having her grammar corrected.
I could hardly wait to make the ladies swoon with my masterful grasp of semi-colon usage. “Come over here, baby girl,” I’d say. “Daddy is going to punctuate your sentence in ways you never dreamed of. You heard me right, sweet thing. I’m about to parse this verb from the infinitive all the way down to the subjunctive. Trust me when I say that as long as we’re together, my participles will never dangle.”
Pickup lines like these never really “worked” on high school girls, but I always chalked that up their own lack of sophistication. If they couldn’t appreciate some well executed iambic pentameter, then that was their problem. Except for the part where they wouldn’t make out with me, at which point it became my problem. But in college, it would be different. In college, the girls would recognize genius when they saw it.
In college, the girls did not recognize genius. It didn’t take long for me to discover the ugly truth that an English major is about as attractive to college girls as a lip fungus. We are simply not cut from the same cloth as people like McDreamy and McBulge-pants, or whatever his name is, with their “chiseled physiques” and their “salaries that are big enough to live on.” And that, I’m sorry to say, is the kind of man that college girls go for.
English majors, on the other hand, tend to be introverted, lumpy, melodramatic Beta Males who, generally speaking, aren’t considered to be “hunks,” except for in the following sentence: “Once the team captains had selected their players, all that remained on the gymnasium floor were a discarded jock strap and the English major, a blubbering, asthmatic hunk of dough in navy shorts and tennis shoes.”
We do have our good points, though, including our soft, uncalloused hands and our ability to weep openly during that one scene when Frodo gets stung by the giant spider and is carried off by the orcs into the castle of Cirith Ungol. Or maybe that’s just me.
But no matter how hard we try, we English majors will never be the objects of lust for those young college women. We will never be able to titillate them with our gerunds. And our writing, while eloquent and emotive, has zero alcohol content, rendering it virtually useless to nine out of 10 college girls. And the tenth probably has a unibrow or wears Crocs.
But Darwin be damned: in the end, we somehow always find a way to get the girl. I personally succeeded – and this is something I recommend to every English major I meet – by making fart jokes.
Women love it when you can make them laugh. Which is something we English majors rarely do, or at least not without getting naked first. But through the magic of fart jokes, I found a way to use my otherwise useless degree to attract a beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird girl who under normal circumstances would have always looked at me like I had just stepped in a big pile of caca-doodie.
Fast-forward 10 years, and here we sit, awaiting the arrival of our son – who, by the way, has already been proven by science to be the single most beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird baby ever. And that one’s no lie.
We English majors are widely recognized as the centerpiece of modern society, the glue that holds it all together, without whom the world would be overrun by grammatical terrorists and would constantly be besieged by run-on sentences and poor punctuation and would surely sputter and die.
A lot of people think of us as some kind of superhuman race, and I admit that they’re not far off. We really are a magnificent breed. Sure, we tend to be snippy and humorless, and often have shortcomings in areas such as “basic math” and “being able to do a push-up,” but we can parse a sentence with the unbridled fury of a grizzly bear and/or Bill O’Reilly.
Not to pour salt on the wound, but in addition to being an English major, I also happen to be a professional editor, and you are not. Like most of my peers, I didn’t choose to be an editor; editing chose me. It’s a higher calling that can’t be ignored, a small, sweet voice floating on the breeze that says, “You live in your parents’ basement, have no job prospects and no marketable skills – why not edit for a magazine?”
We professional editors have a dizzying number of responsibilities, the most important of which is to silently judge everything you do and say. When you conclude a sentence with a preposition, we are there, shaking our heads in disdain. When your pronouns fail to match their antecedents, we are there, snorting away in nerdy, anal-retentive glee. When your participles are left dangling, we are there, watching, always watching. Unless “Passions” is on TV, in which case we’ll be back in an hour.
Of the many grammatical blunders I witness from day to day, my favorite by far is what I like to call the “misuse” of “quotes.” As you’re about to see, this common blunder can turn an ordinary sentence into a veritable “wonderland” of “editorial fun.” Come with me as we skip gaily through the halls of grammar.
Quote marks can be used for a wide variety of reasons within a sentence, all of which are “fun” and “action-packed.” Think of them as the Regis Philbin of punctuation marks; they’re multi-talented, they’re a total hoot, and they’ve got their own TV talk show. Or they should, anyway.
As you may know, the most common use of quote marks is to show when a writer is directly quoting another person.
Example 1: “Majoring in English is a good idea,” said the high school guidance counselor.
Example 2: “Would you like fries with that?” asked the recently graduated English major.
Another function of quote marks is to indicate when a word or phrase is being used in a non-traditional way.
Example 1: I think that George Bush is really “smart” and I hope he gets “reelected” this month.
Example 2: I think that John Kerry is both “handsome” and “engaging” and I look forward to “not dying of boredom” during his inaugural speech.
Another function of quote marks, which I made up just now, is to emphasize certain key words within a joke, thereby making it even “funnier” and “wittier.”
Example 1: Mom, can I have some “money?” I haven’t “eaten” in a week.
Example 2: I guess you should have “thought of that” before you “majored” in “English.”
But sometimes people use quote marks for absolutely no discernible reason, meaning that they’re either “confused” or have some kind of flagrant disregard for the sacred rites of “punctuation,” which is, of course, ridiculous. That’s like saying you hate babies or would like to punch a bunny in the face.
Let’s take a “look” at how some of these misused quote marks can adversely affect a sentence.
Sample sentence one: My favorite restaurant, Señorita Burrita, makes tacos with rice and beans.
Sample sentence two: My favorite restaurant, Señorita Burrita, makes tacos with “rice” and “beans.”
In the first sentence, we learn that there is a restaurant named Señorita Burrita that offers rice and bean tacos.
But in the second sentence, thanks to the errant quote marks, it becomes clear that Señorita Burrita doesn’t actually use rice and beans, but instead fills its tacos with what we can only assume is people.
Now, let’s apply this to a real-life scenario. The other day, I noticed a pet store right near my house with a sign that read: Pet Supplies “and more.”
This is ominous. What’s being communicated here is that, in addition to cat food and birdcages, this pet store stocks something so perverse, something so unspeakably sinister that all the owners can do is hint at it. What lies in the dark and seedy back room of Pet Supplies “and more?” Dick Cheney, that’s what.
That’s just a guess, of course. The only people who can really answer that question are the store’s owners, managers and the two or three English majors who mop the floors after hours.
I also came across an unfortunate advertisement for an area restaurant that said: Wings made “any way you want.”
What the ad is trying to say, of course, is that customers can order their wings in a wide variety of styles. Hot wings, suicide wings, double-suicide wings, the-heat-at-which-Hummer-owners-will-burn-for-eternity wings – the possibilities are limitless. Little do patrons suspect, however, that by saying “any way you want,” the ad actually means that the restaurant makes wings out of people! People!!
As a final example of quote-mark tomfoolery, let’s turn to a sign I stumbled upon recently in a local grocery store that, in order to avoid such complications as “lawsuits” and “accidental death,” we’ll refer to henceforth as “Gigantic Food Stores.”
Upon walking into “Gigantic Food Stores” the other day, I was appalled to discover a fluorescent orange poster advertising a sale on “milk.” This raises a number of questions, the most obvious being, What is “milk?”
As a journalist, it would be irresponsible for me to speculate on the contents of this mystery beverage, other than to note that it probably contains some kind of steroid that will give you back hair and an inexplicable craving for other “Gigantic Food Stores” products, such as “cookies” and “cereal,” both of which contain people. Beyond that, I can’t really speak with any confidence. Except to say it’s a proven fact that people who drink “milk” are pudgy, have a tendency to exaggerate, and have nothing better to do with their time than nitpick about trivial things.
Oh, wait – that’s English majors.
