It’s funny how many posts (on Slashdot, Usenet newsgroups, etc.) that criticize English usage in other messages consistently misspell and misuse the word grammar
. Grammer
is the surname of the actor who plays Frasier Crane on television; grammar
is a set of rules that reflect how a language is actually used
(Richard Lederer, Conan the Grammarian).
If citing Lederer doesn’t satisfy, the OED is a more well-recognized authoritative source:
…many questions of
correctnessin language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.
The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition
Grammar/grammer goes in my list of language peeves, right after slash/backslash (hint: slash is used in fractions and URLs, and backslash is near backspace on most QWERTY keyboards).
