#for the love if god please don’t try to provide helpful pneumonics

[foldingfittedsheets]

My beloved wife is not just a doctor of acupuncture, they also have a Master’s in both English and German. Language is their jam. To their eternal suffering, I do not have perfect grammar. When prompted they said it’s “fairly acceptable” on a day to day basis.

But I do have quirks that make them quietly grit their teeth. One of them is my indifference to differentiation between “is” and “are”. On multiple occasions they’ve tried to explain to me when I misuse “is,” and generally I can’t even parse what’s upset them. They gave an example of me asking, “Is there pickles in the fridge?” rather than the correct “Are there pickles in the fridge?”

They’ve told me that to pacify the editor in their brain they’ll mentally correct my sentences and that’s usually enough. Tonight it was me saying “There is other narrators,” in reference to a series we’re reading. When they pointed it out tonight it was to say that “are” would have been correct because there’s multiple other narrators.

“No,” I countered, “I was trying to use ambiguous language but there is really only one other narrator, so in my mind I knew that and spoke incorrectly because I knew it was singular but the sentence implied it was plural.”

This incensed them further (I also don’t know the difference between further and farther and the pneumonic is just as unhelpful to me as the one for stalactites and stalagmites.)

What’s funny to me though was that I asked about my use of “kind’ve” that people got worked up over in my 20lb ass post. “Doesn’t that bother you? It’s blatantly wrong.”

“No, that’s just a colloquialism, it’s fine.”