Grammar Girl : How Do You Tell If Something Is True? :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

The article begins, “It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS.”

The Hallmarks of a Scientific Study

It goes on to talk about a real gene known to be involved in language processing or development (FOXP2); it shows supposed brain scans comparing the differing responses of people with and without the made-up FOXP2 variant, and it even goes so far as to include a properly formatted citation to the fictitious Journal of Syntactic Cognition in which Baron imagines the article would have been published.

If Only It Were True…

What a delicious story that would have been if it were true, and if you only read the headline, the first paragraph or two, and glanced at the rest, you could be forgiven for believing it was true.

via Grammar Girl : How Do You Tell If Something Is True? :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™.