YSV's SIX QUESTIONS: This week ... Derek from Gallery of the Absurd

Eds note: This is the second in an occasional series where I'm featuring short interviews with other grammar bloggers.

Derek won a Webby Award for his blog in 1997, the first year the awards were held, in the "Weird" category. And this was the very first year of the Webbies.

1) How long have you been blogging about this?

I started the Gallery of the Absurd back in 1996, when I was a graduate student and trying to avoid writing my dissertation. Back then, the Gallery was a website, not a blog like it is now. From the very beginning, I have included signs and advertisements that contain inappropriate quotation mark usage....In general, I'm fascinated by all contemporary advertisements, labels, and signs that are strange or weird or just plain stupid, in one way or another.

2) What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve (besides that which is the blog topic)?

I absolutely hate it when people use "like" in ways that are inappropriate and that "fatten up" their verbiage. Many of my students--even graduate students--use "like" constantly, and it's all I can do not scream some syntax awareness into them. But if I did that, I'd come across as a pedantic English professor, wouldn't I?

3) What was the impetus of your obsession with this?

The impetus of the Gallery of the Absurd, its inappropriate grammatical usage and otherwise, was amusement for my students. In graduate school, I used to find weird ads and labels and put them up in my office. That way, when students came by to conference with me, it would give them something to laugh at and they wouldn't feel so nervous and formal. Then in 1996, when a couple of my friends were starting to create documents on a relatively new thing at our university called the "world wide web," I thought I'd try my hand at creating a website.


4) What's your favorite grammar/style resource?

My favorite grammatical/usage source is perhaps H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage. Although Strunk and White is up there as well. My favorite, or at least most used, style manuals are the MLA Manual of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style. I can work in either.

5) What's one topic you still can't seem to master in your own writing?

Spelling. Even if I know how to spell a certain rarely-used word, I'll look it up. I'm paranoid and obsessive that way, wanting to make sure I'm absolutely right. Also, it looks bad when English professors misspell. But then again, I've always hated that assumption of English folk.

6) Who, as a group, do you believe to be the worst offenders regarding rules of grammar?

I'm not sure I want to go there, since I might be offending whole groups of individuals. Email and text messaging (esp. the latter) has pretty much butchered up the rules of grammar, but then again, this isn't the first time that changes in technology have affected grammar. Perhaps it's neither good or bad, just evolutionary. Language is fluid, and I've never been one to maintain that grammatical rules absolutely can't change. They do over time, and many times we come to accept those changes, to a point. But getting back to my contempt for the inappropriate use of "like": I see this occurring in younger populations. Whenever my kids use "like" in this way, I always correct them. I may be annoying when I correct them, but I won't give up the crusade against useless "likes."