Grammar Police Deputy Badge
To earn your deputy badge, you must be interested in and willing to comply with the following guidelines.
The duties of a Grammar Police (GP) Deputy include but are not limited to:
- Affect an arrest, using forcible language if necessary.
- Subdue resisting subjects using social media and the Web while employing defensive tactical manners, or approved non-lethal words.
- Pursue fleeing suspects both day and night in unfamiliar terrain.
- Use grammatically correct force through barriers to search, seize, investigate, and/or rescue.
- Perform grammar searches of Tweets, Web postings, books, TV/radio, movies, and everyday conversations.
- Climb over obstacles, through openings, jump down from elevated surfaces. Jump over obstacles, ditches and streams. Crawl in confined areas to pursue, search, investigate, and/or rescue. Conduct searches of buildings and large outdoor areas. All figuratively, of course.
- Perform tasks which require thinking, typing, laughing, or reading while performing arrest, rescue, or general grammar patrol functions.
- Prepare investigative and other reports, using appropriate grammar, usage, symbols, and mathematical computations.
- Present aforementioned reports to the Grammar Police Captain (@GrammarCops) via Tweets on Twitter or via comments on https://grammarcops.wordpress.com/
- Communicate effectively over approved grammar enforcement channels while initiating and responding to questions and other communications.
- Communicate verbally and effectively by listening to others and by giving information, directions and commands, often within a 140 character limitation.
- Conduct grammar surveillance for extended periods of time (and always with a smile).
- Perform grammar enforcement patrol functions while working rotating shifts and unanticipated overtime (for which you will never be paid).
- Operate emergency vocabulary during both the day and night in pursuit situations involving grammar goofs in excess of posted limits while exercising due care and caution, in exception to traffic control devices and in congested traffic, unsafe language and environmental conditions.
- Load, unload, aim, and fire words, abbreviations, acronyms, phrases, complete sentences, and other grammar enforcement agency weapons from a variety of body positions in situations that justify the use of non-deadly force while maintaining emotional control under real and/or imagined extreme stress.
- May serve a variety of civil grammar actions. Take a stand.
- Conduct grammar enforcement investigations to include the following critical tasks: protect grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation crime and accident scenes, conduct interviews, record information, measure, and diagram grammar crime and accident scenes, prepare detailed reports of investigative findings, seize and process evidence, present testimony and evidence in civil or criminal grammar court proceedings.
- Recommend appropriate sentences for convicted offenders.
- Perform a variety of public assistance activities. Exercise independent judgment within grammar guidelines.
- Maintain deputy certification requirements as recommended by the captain, and adhere to all policies and procedures.
To apply, please send us an email or submit a comment with your justification.
This is great! I’m going to save this to my ‘bookmark page’.
Thanks April! We appreciate your support.
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As an author, I love the English language and cringe when it is abused, particularly by newspeople – the ones who are getting paid to speak.
Favorite so far: You do not get things FOR free. You get them free.
Thanks for your comment! You can get our “news” FOR no money :-).
My pet hates they’re instead of their, it’s instead of its, of instead of have and your instead of you’re.
Drives me mad!!
Thanks for your comment! For a bit, we were trying to figure out what type of pet you have that hates these things … we usually see “pet peeves” unless the writer is outside of the US. We’re seeing “pet hates” more and more, but usually with an “are” after. 🙂 Too funny :-).
Don’t know if anyone has commented on this, and it has been several weeks, but I was pleased to hear Joan Rivers correct Annie Duke’s grammar on the Celebrity Apprentice finale. Annie said with feeling, “I always act professional.” Joan snarls back, “Professional-ly — it’s an adverb, you ignorant B@%&$!” You go, Joan!
May I be a deputy, please?
@manpowertalks
Afraid to comment in case I get stuff rong. lol
Thanks … “your shoing no feer!”
“Recommend appropriate sentences for convicted offenders.”…you guys are too much! I love it.
As a Journalism school graduate, former editor (well, once an editor, always an editor, right?), and communications consultant, I would wear any such deputy badge with honor.
For years, I’ve been the one to review the letters, articles, essays, emails and any written word created by everyone I know…and their uncles. They send it to me for my careful and naturally trained eye. It’s what I do.
Am I qualified?
We’re here to serve and correct 🙂
“Perform tasks which require thinking, typing, laughing, or reading while performing arrest, rescue or general grammar patrol functions.”
While I prefer a comma before the “and” or “or” in a series, I am willing to concede the difference of opinions. Not in the same sentence.
Thanks for your leniency! We waffle on this issue … depends upon the format. We used to be strict about including a comma before the last element in a series, but now we let it slide, slide and lapse. 🙂
GrammarCops –
I just launched a new site that you may be interested in (sentence ending in a preposition!). Before you disregard this comment as SPAM, I highly suggest you check out http://www.quotidianword.com. It seems, how you say, right up your alley.
Thanks!
Jason, aka epeolatrist
Thanks much … we’ve just linked to you.
Make me a deputy because: My blood boils every time I see a misplaced apostrophe (Banana’s, 99¢ / lb). I go berserk when I read “should of” instead of “should have.” When someone says, “Me and her went to the store,” I want to smash something.
I’m a grammar smitty, pure and simple!
Oh, and this job requirement cracked me up:
“Load, unload, aim and fire words, abbreviations, acronyms, phrases, complete sentences, and other grammar enforcement agency weapons from a variety of body positions in situations that justify the use of non-deadly force while maintaining emotional control under real and/or imagined extreme stress.”
Ugh! Bad grammar and poorly written sentences make me cringe. My work day is usually spend fixing the often horriffic writing of those around me. Plus, I’m a minimalist: why use 500 words when 140 characters will do?!
Please deputize me. Idled copy editor needs the exercise.
I’d like to be an official junior deputy. I’m only ten years old, but I’ve already placed seventeen people under citizens arrest for abusing the English language. I’ve arrested my brother eleven times. I’ve arrested my mom once and my teacher twice. I don’t use handcuffs or anything, but once I stuffed a sock into my brother’s mouth, tied him up, and made him listen to grammar podcasts. Is that enough to qualify?
I promise to use my powers for the good of misplaced commas everywhere. I would love to be a deputy.
Your site is my new Star!
I happened on your website from a link and now you have been added to my favorites for life.
Pet peeves:
Your – You’re (interchangeably)
They – Their – There – They’re (eee-gads)
And my all time favorite?
Please bare with me.
(Used regularly by an ex-business partner)
However, I still have wrestling matches with: its – it’s!
My biggest pet peeve has to be when people say ‘alot’. You don’t say ‘alittle’ you say ‘a little’, therefore, it’s ‘a lot’.
As a writer, editor and reviewer I would say the thing you most have to be careful of is sounding like a snob. Not everybody likes to be afraid to speak for fear they are being critiqued.
As for comma placement, I had one teacher who hated them before the last word in a list. Another professor insisted on them. Matter of choice I guess.
My number one word usage annoyance: People who say “ant,” when they mean “aunt.”
“Blogrammar” never ceases to amaze me.
Here is one for the books from “mindmastery” :
http://mindmastery.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/do-we-only-you-10-of-our-brain/
The title of the blog and the heading:
“Do we only you 10% of our brain?”
Apparently not……..
I hate it when people write “should of” instead of “should have”. For example, “I should of gone to the store”. Almost everyone I know does this.
I once mailed the editorial section of the newspaper back to the editor covered in a sea of red ink. Where in the hell was the copy editor? The story threatens to become legend.
This more than qualifies me to be deputized.
Hi Grammarcops,
Congratulations on your fabulous website! I write for a magazine for teenagers who are learning English.
I’m researching an article on vigilantes who patrol the internet correcting bad grammar.
Would it be possible to talk to the founders of Grammarcops? I’d love to hear about the origins of this site…and its development to date.
I look forward to hearing from you!
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I correct my piano students’ grammatical errors right in front of their parents. May I be a deputy?
I’m honored. 🙂
Please accept this application for the position of Grammar Cop. I have 40 years of experience specializing in the misuse of passive voice. I put the reporter who wrote this in grammar jail for six months:
“The body of a Van Nuys woman was found stuffed in the back of her car by police. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation by the coroner.”
Imagine that! The coroner strangled her and then the police stuffed her body in the back of her car.
My secondary specialty (very, very difficult to enforce) is catching people using reflexive pronouns as regular pronouns. As in, “Please complete the forms and give them to either Professor Johnson or myself.” If Professor Johnson were not available, would the correct instruction be, “Please complete the forms and give them to myself?”
And I’m hoping to start up an academy that teaches grammar cadets to enforce the rules regarding, “Him and me were late for school.”
Please swear me in.
Thanks!
I would like to become a officer of the english language. I can skim over text and be able to find grammatical errors. Also, I am a retired officer of the Grammar Nazis. My last specialty is discerning your and you’re as well as others. Please add me to your ranks.
As an English/Language Arts teacher of sixteen years, I have earned my badge many times over.
I’ve been an Undercover Grammar Police Officer for a long time. It’s about time we got official recognition for our unappreciated efforts.
Mikey, if you want official recognition, feel free to order your very own Grammar Police badge here:
http://jlbenet.com/grammar-police-badge/
I am absolutely thrilled to find this site! I have been having fits of rage over the incorrect use of “it’s” for more than 50 years (thank you Sister Charles, 7th grade English!). I am also fond of diagramming sentences! My latest gripe is the flagrant use of the word “voila “disguised as VIOLA, WAHLAH and WALLA. Are there no correction institutions for this?
I was raised by an unofficial grammar cop. No homework left the house without my mom’s seal of approval of perfect grammar and spelling. Although there have been a few times where I’ve used all capitals to accentuate a point, it has only been when I haven’t been able the set the word on bold or strong. I do correct other but with tact so they know I mean well. The English language can be confusing if one doesn’t pay attention to the rules.
I am so thrilled to see I can order an official badge! My husband immediately asked if there were tickets to accompany this! Are there? I would buy them by the carton!!
I have a question which is bugging me…. If there are two deputies and they each have an office in the same area. Should the sign read Deputies’ Offices or Deputies Office or Deputies’ offices’. I keep seeing a sign in the school I work at that says: Deputies office….. I am pretty sure this is incorrect. PLEASE HELP!