<story><title>You&apos;re the Smartest Guy In The Room ... but please, try to restrain yourself.</title><url>http://www.plope.com/smartest_guy_in_the_room</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcantor</author><text>I commend you, good sir, and assert that you are no grammar nazi.  A nazi is crude, unreasonable and thoughtless.  You are none of these things.  You have merely demanded a minimum amount of effort from the people around you, an infinitesimal moment spent in quiet reflection that could perhaps result in a magical epiphany resembling, &quot;Wait a minute, if I could care &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt;, that means I am caring &lt;i&gt;more than the minimum!  That is not what I am trying to express!&lt;/i&gt;  Alack, I must duly backspace.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Edit: And to whoever downvoted this man, I officially call you a knave.</text></item><item><author>run4yourlives</author><text>I was with him until he said &quot;I could care less&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Couldn&apos;t damnit, &lt;i&gt;could not.&lt;/i&gt; This irks me to no end.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/grammar nazi&amp;#62;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noonespecial</author><text>It is important to write correctly. If you allow &quot;I could care less&quot; to congeal on top of &quot;I &lt;i&gt;couldn&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; care less&quot; in one big idiomatic mess, you more or less lose the ability to express &quot;I could care less&quot;.&lt;p&gt;A more extreme example that also bothers me to no end is &quot;begs the question.&quot; Its now quite impossible to use this phrase to call out the logic error to which it originally referred as it is now used interchangeably with &quot;raises the question&quot;. When I want to call the error, I have to do a mini exposition on circular reasoning. I feel cheated out of this fine piece of language.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a difference between nazism and simply insisting on correctness. I also commend.</text></comment>
<story><title>You&apos;re the Smartest Guy In The Room ... but please, try to restrain yourself.</title><url>http://www.plope.com/smartest_guy_in_the_room</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcantor</author><text>I commend you, good sir, and assert that you are no grammar nazi.  A nazi is crude, unreasonable and thoughtless.  You are none of these things.  You have merely demanded a minimum amount of effort from the people around you, an infinitesimal moment spent in quiet reflection that could perhaps result in a magical epiphany resembling, &quot;Wait a minute, if I could care &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt;, that means I am caring &lt;i&gt;more than the minimum!  That is not what I am trying to express!&lt;/i&gt;  Alack, I must duly backspace.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Edit: And to whoever downvoted this man, I officially call you a knave.</text></item><item><author>run4yourlives</author><text>I was with him until he said &quot;I could care less&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Couldn&apos;t damnit, &lt;i&gt;could not.&lt;/i&gt; This irks me to no end.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/grammar nazi&amp;#62;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TrevorJ</author><text>I think the key metric is that useful grammatical suggestions are ones that make the communication more clear. At the end of the day, clarity should be the focus. It bothers me when people make silly grammatical errors, but many of them end up in the final text because our minds auto-correct for them and as such they rarely pose much of a problem in terms of actual clarity.</text></comment>