After teaching high school and community college English for 30 years, I'm ruined. I can't read a blessed thing that I don't "grade." I'm also adept at reading "Dumb" and can figure out almost any word or phrase. My masters in Medieval literature really took me far with freshman Basic English. Personally, I'm just an old stump jumper from southern Illinois, and my wife (another English teacher---yes, our kids are really, really screwed up) is a reformed Chicagoan.
I'm a chicagoan who moved to southern illinois to get my degree in linguistics/etymology and become an exacting grammarian at SIUE. I then spent the second stage of my career (about 4 years) as a copy editor for a range of companies re-writing the horrid copy of several copy writers, "journalists" and other microsoft-word-enabled professionals.
I feel your pain. It hurts so bad that i completely refuse to type in proper grammar, capitalization or punctuation any longer (with the exception of oxford commas or hyphens...i hate them both) when communicating in a casual sense (obviously a resume or a cover letter or something official would get my full attention....forum posts, however, are subject to over-use of parentheses and ellipses, and complete disregard for the length of a sentence).
side note - it bugs me to no end that a gym teacher gets to be an "ologist" but i (and you) only achieve the rank of "ian." nothing against kinesiologists, it is a fine trade with a really difficult set of rules and physiological aspects of the human body to understand. It just bothered me that the football coach, with no formal kinesiology education, got to be a kinesiologist, while I, with several advanced degrees, were i to teach english, could only at best call myself a grammarian.
an "ologist" is a professional in the study of, while an "ian" means adherence to. In fact, grammarians are usually better than "ologists," since not only do they study the "ology" of grammar, but they are also usually strict adherents to the laws thereof.
I have decided that people like you and I need a new rank. "grammareologistician."
