Are Grammar Trolls the Real Villians?

It's genuinely possible

I’d like to submit the above photo as the one that best captures the 21st century. While “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” is probably a close second, or possibly a precursor, this sign has everything.

The photo is from a rally against 15-minute cities in Oxford, England.

If you’re not familiar with the 15-minute city, it’s an urban design plan that favors walkable/bikable neighborhoods. If you have schools, groceries, shops and entertainment all within 15 minutes of your home, and safe ways to get to those places, you will drive less.

If you want to.

A plan like this wouldn’t work where I live, where leaving your car running is conspicuous consumption. We still have guys owning the libs by having smoke stacks on their Dodge pickups.

Recently, possibly because they lacked things to worry about, the conspiracy crowd latched on to the 15-minute city as a new world order pogrom. As I say with some regularity about conspiracy theorists, there’s no point in engaging with them because their outrage isn’t about whatever they claim.

Conspiracy people desperately seek to be persecuted minorities. They need a reason for their life to be how it is. They need that reason to be someone else’s fault. What’s bothersome and a little unfortunate is, many have their antennae on autopilot. I say, “many” because while some liberal conspiracy nuts abound, a majority seem laser-focused on the Jewish/Black/Liberal conspiracy that anything tangentially (or stereotypically) related is suspect.

In a post-ironic age, I imagine the MAGA brigade protesting the 15-minute city as an affront to their freedoms, even though back when America was great, you didn’t need a car to function in your society. Thankfully, though, we’re talking about a (mostly) European conspiracy movement right now.

That 15-minute cities are the first step in a ghetto system of control and surveillance terrifies them. That they get this garbage from targeted social media is lost on them because they’re stupid. It seems as if many see 15-minute cities as a liberal agenda item. I don’t doubt the sincerity in their protests, but they have the same backward, trolling sincerity that makes people affix smokestacks to their pickup trucks.

None of those things make this the most important photo I’ve seen in a long time. Let me direct your attention to the corrected text on the poster board.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess someone replaced the word “its” with “it’s” not long before the person who made the poster was on their way to the protest.

We talk about Twitter and Facebook as vitriolic cesspools for good reason, but Grammar Nazism isn’t often cited as a reason the platforms devolved. Before disinformation campaigns, before Cambridge Analytica, even before it became profitable to be a troll, mocking people for their creative use of capitalizations and apostrophes was the most ubiquitous “owning” on the internet.

I’ve done it (I’ll do it again before the end of this story) even though I’m my spelling’s notoriously atrocious. I wasn’t trying to “own” anyone or cultivating a sense of superiority. Spellcheck has screwed me in the past. Hell, I’ve run 72-point headlines with typos in them. Still, there’s a material difference between a typo and a fundamental misunderstanding about how the written language works.

I wouldn’t correct someone’s grammar in public. I wouldn’t derail a conversation to point out that someone misspoke. Online, though, I can see the appeal of deriding something mean or wrongheaded and topping it off with an attack on a person’s entire educational background.

In retrospect, though, I wonder about the relationship between making someone feel intellectually inadequate when they’re sitting at a machine with access to the whole of human knowledge and whether that was a catalyst for where social media (and discourse) ended up.

That is what makes this photo fascinating. This is a person who knows they’re taking a “fringe” position. Hell, the lady behind him claims 200,000 children disappeared during the lockdowns.

Beyond being self-aware of his fringe position, he knows that people who take fringe positions get mocked for poor grammar. That didn’t prevent him from writing without checking or thinking, but at least somehow he discovered the mistake and made the correction.

Partially.

He’s got a verb problem because “ghettos” is plural in the premise but singular in the conclusion.

As an admittedly terrible speller, I’ve learned to check words I know I don’t know, even if spellcheck tells me a word is right, I’ll often double check. For example, even though I spelled “atrocious” correctly earlier, I still looked it up.

The person who told this protestor about his “its” problem couldn’t spell “tyrannical” either. There’s no shame in that. I only caught the misspelling because the kooks I write about use tyrannical to describe anything that even looks like a legal construct.

What makes the photo evocative is the time and care this man took to still be factually as well as grammatically wrong, as if spellcheck is somwhow part of the system of tyrannical control. Their grammar paranoia would be much funnier if kooks like this didn’t have a history of grabbing machetes and hacking up their neighbors.

But they do.

Conspiracy nuts are people who don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to reconcile conflict. Their devout skepticism is part of their personality, part of their self-image, and demonstrably wrong. These people are too fragile to be told they’re wrong, and they’re exhausted from being told they’re wrong all the time.

First, it was their grammar, then it was the way they referred to ethnic minorities, then it was the way they referred to women, then to sexual minorities. They don't like being told how to speak or what to believe. They can’t imagine where all these new “rules” originate so they assume it’s part of Them trying to exert Control.

Just as they’ve misunderstood the rules for capitalization and punctuation, they’ve misunderstood the point of learning. Learning (contrary to what the Grammar Nazis would have us believe) isn’t about taking down and regurgitating facts. It’s not about the regimented mastery of knowledge.

Learning helps us better navigate the world and relate to our fellow beings with a little less fear. That’s where the conspiracy folks’ ignorance is a problem, it breeds fear.

A person can only be so terrified for so long before they snap. When that point comes, we should thank our lucky stars if they’re satisfied just walking around with an ill-conceived poster.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

Postscript

I’ve started poking back into lizard conspiracies, mining Sherry Shriner for more fun facts. Between you me and the mantlepiece, they’re doing another couple of documentaries so I’m resurrecting my unexecuted book promotion plans to coincide with this latest bite at the apple.

As always, feel free to comment below. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the personal emails but if we want to have a larger conversation, this is a safe space to do it. Of course, you also can use the Substack chat function.