AITA for caring about grammar?

Is being understood the only thing that matters?

There are several lovely little trail identifiers and signs along the hiking and mountain biking paths in my community to help mark progress, confirm location, and point you in the right direction. One in particular stands out to me, on the corner of a much-used, family-friendly trail in the network:

As seen on the trails.

I imagine a group of kids, happily decorating the rocks, lugging them up to the trail, placing them just so.. And then enjoying them every time they ride by. A real adventure! A great way to spend an afternoon! So why does the error drive me absolutely bonkers every time I see it? Am I The Asshole?

A few weeks ago, I even went so far as to tuck a sharpie into my bag, fully intending to correct the mistake before carrying on with my ride, self-satisfied and smug, thinking I’d made the world a better place.

But I didn’t do it. Part of me didn’t feel like taking my backpack off to retrieve the pen; part of me didn’t feel like losing the momentum of my ride. But part of me also wondered, “why do I even care?” What’s the big deal about grammar when you consider the bigger picture?

At various stages of my life - in elementary and high school, university, work - I have been told that I had written something well. And while you may disagree (and I’m certain many people do!), over the years I have come to believe that writing is something I’m good at, and especially grammar and spelling, such that I began to identify with it. There was a time I even considered it a superpower - there was hardly a book or article that I would read where I wouldn’t find at least one error that I would heartily point out to anyone within earshot. I once walked into a design studio in Vancouver that had lines and lines of text spanning its warehouse walls and there was an error that jumped out at me so immediately it was almost like a spotlight on the words. I couldn’t not see it. I felt thrillingly righteous in discovering the wrong. (The shop owners, for their part, politely thanked me for pointing it out, but honestly could not possibly have cared less). So maybe the erosion of emphasis on writing skills feels like an attack on my very existence: if writing correctly is pointless, does that mean I’m pointless too? 

Conan O'Brien. Wix.

I mean, it’s complicated. For all my pride in and insistence on the correct way to write, or admonishments about the right use of syntax and punctuation, “proper” English writing has long served as a signifier of class and competence, thereby belittling people whose first - or even second or third - language isn’t English, and pushing to the margins people with neurodiversities that include dyslexia and dysgraphia. I recognize I should be more sensitive. Some of the people I love the most don’t – can’t, won’t – share my obsession with precise language, and they get along just fine. They’re among the smartest, most creative, expressive, and clearest communicators I know. 

So in other words, yes – in some ways, I am the asshole. Not for caring, but for failing to appreciate the bigger picture, and for failing to recognize that my bias comes from the privilege of ease in mainstream education, not from any inherent excellence. I know that clarity is the point. The goal is to get the meaning across, the intent. There are already too many barriers to understanding each other, but being a stickler for “proper” grammar seems like acting in bad faith.

Annie Murphy as Alexis Rose on Schitt's Creek. Wix.

But I am also, at my core, a Libra, and my brain always goes to “the other hand” -- and I lament the loss. And it’s not just a loosening of rules or evolution of language - it has become an actual loss of capacity. Literacy levels are “stagnating or declining in most OECD countries”, due in large part to the advent of the smartphone. University students are losing the ability to understand works that were once regularly read by children.

"The result is not only a loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishment of the human experience." - James Marriott

What else is lost if we can no longer understand the ideas and stories of those who came before us? We are moving away from an era of ideas and knowledge, analysis and critique and toward one of opinions and feelings, emotions and speculation. We’re losing the ability to engage with difficult, logical, challenging material, and to recognize the difference. In his article, “The dawn of the post-literate society”, James Marriott argues that it was the explosion of literacy that ultimately meant the downfall of European aristocracies and monarchies, and that it is its current decline that is leading to the rise, once again, of mystical, populist, oligarchic plutocracies.

Ignorance was the foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

So where does that leave me? Between us, I understand that being a stickler for spelling and grammar is not helping anyone become more engaged with the written word. And anything that I can do to help keep the flame of reading and learning alive, I will try to do. There is so much at stake. And even though it was hard, but I took the pen out of my backpack and put it away. I vow to ignore any need for, or misuse of, God’s comma. I may just have to direct my scorn toward the lowercase L instead 🙂.

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REFERENCES:

Marriott, James. (2025). The dawn of the post-literate society. Substack.com

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. https://www.oecd.org