Maybe there's a reason we call them Grammar Nazis after all ...

I mean, other countries have had mean, nasty agents of government. But (and I think I picked this up from comradexavier, who once said he was "not the grammar Reichsfuehrer, though, more like the grammar Parteigenosse") I'm used to the phrase "Grammar Nazi."

It seemed all the more appropriate today when I realized that my study of German taught me a lot of stuff that's useful now in thinking about English grammar. I can diagram things, I can deal with prepositions, I stop only to smell the adjectives and kick some ass. I figured out the dative case; English holds no horrors for me now!

I even got a compliment on my "Stein auf!" t-shirt from the boy who sat next to me in class today. Hooray for German!

The best part about class, though, was when Janet told us that "to be" verbs (or was it linking verbs? some kind of verb) "are called the copula. As in ... " she trailed off, and thirty college students laughed. Then she went on to tell us about some guy whose name I forgot who wrote about how grammar was like sex. More laughter. "And I bet you can guess which gender a 12th-cenury Frenchman thought a verb was," she said, "and which gender a noun was." I thought about verbs, the action words, and nouns, the things acted upon by the verbs, and laughed.

I don't know if this means language is sexy, or grammarians aren't getting laid enough.

Forget "fat"--does my butt look pointy in these pants?

I began to wonder today if there isn't something wrong with my butt. In the past month or so, I've had three pairs of jeans randomly tear badly enough to be irreparable in all but one case (and my mom said that was tenuous and probably wouldn't last long, so I shouldn't wear them in public or something).

One tore near--but of course, not on--the seam running from hip to ankle, one was just under the back pocket, one was either on the back or the inside of my left thigh, I can't remember now. These all happened not from me snagging something or living an interesting life, but just from walking, sitting down, boring things that jeans should be able to handle!

This is a disturbing trend, if only beause pants are expensive and important to me. I have three pairs now--and two of them are brand-new, bought by Mutti to replace the first two that disintegrated--so they better be okay for a while!

It's not as if I'm buying them from Wal-Mart or something. I'm of the school of thought that says buying decent quality things means you not only have decent things, but that they'll outlast the cheap things while being intrinsically cooler and better all the while. So I buy jeans at Maurice's. They're nice and I love them; I'm probably just wearing them out (the last ones I actually wasn't surprised at; maybe I'm just getting used to this happening, but they were my oldest pair and seemed to be wearing thin).

Either that, or my butt, which I've always thought to be soft and round, is actually prickly or spiky and somehow tears through denim.