Sticklers unite!

There are some standard questions one is destined to encounter on striking up conversation with a fellow Westerner or local alike.

"How long have you been in Korea?"
"What are you doing here?"
"What was your major?" ("Well, I didn't minor in anything...")
"Math? And you're an English teacher?"

It doesn't seem logical. Of course when you realise that your job requirements are a degree and a native passport, what it says on your graduation certificate is of little importance as long as you know a few English idioms.

I realise I'm teaching kindergarten. I can barely get them to sit still let alone sit through a lesson on plurals. I do teach a class of predominantly enthusiastic nine year old girls once a day, and in exchange for cute stickers I get my fix of basic grammatical and spelling quizzes in. It doesn't quite cut it, though.

If you're a fellow pedant, perfectionist or downright obsessive, and we've ever had an online chat (or indeed offline, but the spoken word is so much more subjective, especially if we're not from the same country, or indeed county) you may have been subject to a correction or two. In fact, I like nothing more than to be corrected myself, to then do nothing less than shake my head in disbelief and hide in shame as I see I've just pressed "enter" to the opening, "So, its just that..." Admittedly my apostrophe key does stick and has often been victim of severe banging to get the little dash in place, but this is often a case of a bad typist blaming her keyboard.

Anyway, it has occurred to me that this is why I studied maths. I'm a grammar freak; a punctuation fascist; a spelling enthusiast. I like rules, I like to stick to them, and I like things to be right.

Since I've started studying Korean more seriously, my obsessions with language have been cranked up a notch or six. How can I possibly master a foreign language if I've not even mastered my own? It's got so bad that these days I don't even trust my Korean friends to give me accurate spelling advice, and certainly any blog post is always subject to extreme scrutiny and will likely be edited for comma use several times after publishing.

So, after this morning's ponderings on the Oxford comma, I left my apartment specifically to pick myself up a copy of Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". I remember it adorning every bookshop window at home on its first publication but was never aware of its contents. How I've been missing out. In the words of an old school friend, this book is orgasmic. It is feeding my incredulity at poorly punctuated signs, and consolidating my notions of when we should or should not use that poor apostrophe. Ms. Truss deems herself a "stickler" and, on racing through this book, it is evident I am one too.

Certainly badly signed shop windows are not something that I miss about England, but my fellow stickler friends I do. There are only so many people in one's social circles that you can share a good punctuation joke with.