A Word, Please: A cartoonish headline has little behind it

By June Casagrande

April 29, 2016 2 PM PT

A single-panel cartoon penned by Jim Borgman in the late 1990s showed a news anchor sitting in front of three “Wheel of Fortune”-type wheels — the kind a contestant on a game show would spin hoping that, when the spinning stopped, a needle would point to a big prize.

But the wheels in the cartoon didn’t hold promises of cash or catamarans. Instead, the first was inscribed with “coffee,” “exercise,” “smoking” and similar items. To the right of the wheel was the text “can cause,” which led to a second wheel marked with “hypothermia,” “heart disease” and “a feeling of well-being.” After that was the word “in,” which led to the final wheel, marked with terms like “rats,” “twins” and “overweight smokers.”

Above them was the header “Today’s Random Medical News,” which, according to the cartoon, was made possible by the New England Journal of Panic-inducing Gobbledygook.

I was reminded of this cartoon after a recent grammar-related news item boasted a similarly tenuous grasp of scientific reasoning.

“A study published in March suggests what we’ve all long suspected: People who are obsessed with grammar aren’t as nice as the rest of us,” proclaimed the online news site Mashable.

The lede alone is enough to make a reader proclaim, “I knew it!” No need to read further. Something “we’ve all long suspected” has been validated by scientific research — a double-whammy leaving little room for doubt. Case closed. Time to surf to YouTube for some cat videos.

But to anyone who kept reading, the smoking gun in the case of the Grammar Nerds vs. Human Decency started to look more like a warm butter knife.

The study, conducted by two University of Michigan researchers, asked 83 participants to read email responses to an ad for a roommate, some of which contained grammar mistakes like confusing “its” with “it’s,” Mashable reported.

Then the participants were asked to evaluate the authors of the emails. The participants also filled out a personality test. The results showed that the people who ranked as “less agreeable” on the personality test took a harsher view of the grammar mistakes.

Ipso facto, the “grammar obsessed” — you know, the kind of people who read grammar columns and certainly the people who write them — are jerks.

You buying that?

I can find at least 83 things wrong with that reasoning. And that’s before we point out that the article mentioned nothing about being “obsessed” or even about niceness. On the contrary, it reported only that the too-small-to-be-meaningful sampling of people who were less-than-agreeable about grammar errors tended to be less-than-agreeable about other things.

Stop the presses.

Faulty logic didn’t stop this article from getting some pretty good traction in social media, including among friends who sent me the link as a form of playful ribbing. So there are two things we should take from this.

The first is that, in a digital world where everyone is competing for your attention, you have to read past the spin. The second is that you might want to bone up on the difference between “it’s” and “its,” just in case you ever have to correspond with one of us monstrous grammar obsessives.

“It’s” is always a contraction of two words. It means either “it is” or “it has.” It’s a beautiful day. It’s been great talking to you.

“Its,” without an apostrophe, shows possession: The cat licked its paw. The pot blew its lid.

It’s easy to get confused here because lots of other possessives use apostrophes. Think of “its” as the exception.

On the other hand, you could ignore me — just write this off as the ramblings of a grammar obsessive who, as you long suspected, just isn’t very nice. Your reasoning would be every bit as scientifically sound as reports that smoking causes hypothermia in rat twins.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.