I don't know what they Meade
Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2016 12:00 am
Most of us have encountered them at some point, the sticklers for the English language who get visibly riled by a rogue apostrophe or a grammatical slip up.
But new research has uncovered some traits that so-called 'grammar Nazis' all seem to share – they are introverts who are also likely to be disagreeable by nature.
Extroverts by comparison are far more likely to be relaxed about grammatical errors and typos.
While there have always been self-appointed 'grammar police' who feel the need to highlight errors on the signs, adverts and literature around them, social media has given them new outlets to vent their rage.
However, social media sites such as Twitter, together with text messages and email, have also brought new sources of poor grammar as users turn to abbreviations of words and make mistakes in their haste to send a message.
To examine what kind of people are most bothered by this, a team of linguists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, studied the reactions of a group of volunteers to emails containing grammatical mistakes.
They had expected to find similarities in age, sex and education among those who react most vigorously to these kind of errors.
Instead, they discovered these factors actually played little role in whether someone would become irritated by poor grammar and typos.
They were associated with some specific personality types, though.
Writing in the journal Public Library of Science One, linguists Professor Julie Boland and Professor Robin Queen who conducted the study, said: 'Different sets of personality traits were relevant for the two types of errors.
'More extraverted people were likely to overlook written errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively.
'Less agreeable people were more sensitive to grammos (grammatical errors), while more conscientious and less open people were sensitive to typos.'
Hey now, there's no harm in pointing out proper grammatical construction and one can hardly be detained for being an annoyance! 