Grammar Führer

Phew! That’s a relief. I read Eric Meyer’s thoughts on Textual Healing, in which he was described as a grammar “Fuhrer” (sic). So, the gauntlet was thrown down, the stakes were high, and I headed over to Quizilla’s grammar quiz.

Am relieved to say that the verdict on my language skills was also:

You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your authority. You will crush all the inferior people under the soles of your jackboots, and any who question your motives will be eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane of every other person’s existence, because you’re constantly contradicting stupidity. Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams of a master race of spellers and grammarians frighten the masses. You must always watch your back. If only your power could be used for good instead of evil.

Am now pondering whether to take issue with Quizilla that “Fuhrer” is diacritically impoverished (i.e. should be Führer). Reminds me of a few lines of dialogue recounted to me by my friend Matt Bradburn in which a man was accused of “pedanticism”. His only reponse to this was to say in hushed tones, “pedantry”. My thoughts exactly.

A sidebar to this article is when posting this, the accented “u” (which on my Windows keyboard is achievable through Alt+129) didn’t render as I would have wished (presumably utf-8 encoding is different), so off I went on a hunt for HTML equivalent characters, and found a very useful resource at starr.net. It turns out that the HTML markup is ü i.e. “u umlaut”, which brings me on to another diatribe from my soapbox.

umlaut is the German word for the English diaeresis i.e. a diacritic (accent) of two dots over a printed character. Dictionary.com’s definition is quite helpful. I can see that it is more often used in German that English, but not exclusively (e.g. the examples given in the above definition: Brontë and naïve). &udia; anyone?

In any case, the quiz is quite illustrative.