Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite

What do suicidal pandas, doped-up rock stars, and a naked Pamela Anderson have in common? They’re all a heck of a lot more interesting than reading about predicate nominatives and hyphens. June Casagrande knows this and has invented a whole new twist on the grammar book. Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies is a laugh-out-loud funny collection of anecdotes and essays on grammar and punctuation, as well as hilarious critiques of the self-appointed language experts.

Chapters include:

• I’m Writing This While Naked—The Oh-So Steamy Predicate Nominative
• Semicolonoscopy—Colons, Semicolons, Dashes, and Other Probing Annoyances
• I’ll Take "I Feel Like a Moron" for $200, Alex—When to Put Punctuation Inside Quotation Marks
• Snobbery Up with Which You Should Not Put Up—Prepositions
• Is That a Dangler in Your Memo or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
• Hyphens—Life-Sucking, Mom-and-Apple-Pie-Hating, Mime-Loving, Nerd-Fight-Inciting Daggers of the Damned

Casagrande delivers practical and fun language lessons not found anywhere else, demystifying the subject and taking it back from the snobs. In short, it’s a grammar book people will actually want to read—just for the fun of it.

1. A Snob For All Seasons—Shared Possessives

2. For Whom The Snob Trolls—"Who"/"Whom" and Why You're Right Not to Care

3. Passing The Simpsons Test— It's "Till," Not "Til"

4. To Boldly Blow—Only Windbags Fuss over Split Infinitives

5. The Sexy Mistake—"To Lay" versus "To Lie"

6. Snobbery Up With Which You Should Not Put—Prepositions

7. Is That A Dangler In Your Memo Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?

8. An Open Letter To Someone Who Knows I Once Tried To Be A Grammar Snob But Failed—"Dreamed" versus "Dreamt," "Preventive" versus "Preventative," and Similar Pairs

9. Anarchy Rules— "Adviser"/Advisor," "Titled"/"Entitled," and Other Ways to Be Right and Wrong at the Same Time

10. The Comma Denominator—Good News: No One Knows How to Use These Things

11. Semicolonoscopy—Colons, Semicolons, Dashes, Hyphens, and Other Probing Annoyances

12. The O.C.: Where The '80s Never Die—Lessons on the Apostrophe from Behind the Orange Curtain

13. Go Ahead, Make Up Your Own Words—Prefixes and Suffixes and Why the Dictionary Thinks You're Wrong

14. Hyphens: Life-Sucking, Mom-And-Apple-Pie-Hating, Mime-Loving, Nerd-Fight-Inciting Daggers Of The Damned

15. I'll Take "I Feel Like A Moron" For $200, Alex—When to Put Punctuation Inside Quotation Marks

16. A Chapter Dedicated To Those Other Delights Of Punctuation

17. Copulative Conjunctions: Hot Stuff For The Truly Desperate—Conjunctions to Know and Conjunctions That Blow

18. R U Uptite?—Shortcuts in the Digital Age and the Meanies Who Hate Them

19. Literally Schmiterally

20. How To Drop Out Of High School In The Ninth Grade And Still Make Big Bucks Telling People How To Use Good Grammar—"That" versus "Which"

21. Well, Well, Aren't You Good?—Adverbs Love Action

22. Fodder For Those Mothers—"Irregardless" and Other Slipups We Nonsnobs Can't Afford

23. I Wish I Were Batgirl—The Subjunctive Mood

24. Mommy's All Wrong, Daddy's All Wrong—The Truth about "Cans" and "Dones"

[25. The Kids Are All Wrong—"Alright," Dropping "The" Before "the The," Where to Put Your "Only," and Other Lessons from the World of Rock 'n' Roll

26. How To Impress Brad Pitt—"Affect" versus "Effect"

27. And You Too Can Begin Sentences With "And," "So," "But," And "Because"

28. Your Boss Is Not Jesus—Possessives and Words Ending in "S," "X," and "Z"

29. The Silence Of The Linguists—Double Possessives and Possessives with Gerunds

30. I'm Writing This While Naked—The Oh-So-Steamy Predicate Nominative

31. I Wish I May, I Wish I Might For Once In My Life Get This One Right—"May" versus "Might," "Different From" versus "Different Than," "Between" versus "Among," and Other Problematic Pairs

32. A Backyard Barbecue In The Back Yard, A Front-Yard Barbecue In The Front Yard—The Magical Moment When Two Words Become One

33. How To Never, Ever Offend Anyone With Inadvertently Sexist Or Racist Language

34. Complete Sentences? Optional!

35. It's/Its A Classroom Ditz—Or How I Learned to Stop Fuming and Love the Jerkwad

36. Eight, Nine, 10, 11—How to Write Numbers

37. If At First You Don't Irk A Snob, Try And Try Again—"Try To" versus "Try And"

38. Express Lane Of Pain—"Less Than" versus "Fewer Than"

39. Agree To Dis A Meanie—Subject-Verb Agreement, Conjugating Verbs for "None" and "Neither," and Other Agreement Issues

40. The Emperor's New Clause—Pronouns That Are Objects and Subjects, "Each Other" versus "One Another," and More Evidence That the "Experts" Aren't All They're Cracked Up to Be

41. Satan's Vocabulary

42. You Really Can Look It Up

Acknowledgments

Sources