You misunderstand me! I'm not in love with Ho Ching!

Recently, I received an email from a blog reader who made quite a ridiculous remark. He asked me why I had written no posts on Ho Ching's grammar. He asked me if I was in love with her! 

The reader obviously thinks of me as one of those irritating hypercritical pedants I despise - the ones who are always looking out for errors in other people's speech or writing. He has misunderstood the entire purpose of my grammar blogs. Let me make myself clear with two simple points:

1. I don't care two hoots about English grammar. Let this point sink in, please.

2. But if someone or a group of people who claim to be English experts criticise someone else for an alleged language mistake and it's the critics who are wrong, my sense of decency and justice will not permit me to say nothing about it. It is for this reason that I have rather unkind things to say about Singapore's disgraceful Speak Good English Movement and others. Click here for a list of my blog posts on these hypercritical ignoramuses, particularly the Speak Good English Movement. 

I don't know why the reader mentioned Ho Ching in particular but I am not interested in Ho Ching's grammar because she has never claimed to be a language expert and she does not go round criticising others for imagined mistakes which some ignorant pedants do. And Ho Ching writes impeccably well.

Everyone makes mistakes. Most of these mistakes are the result of carelessness. Who really bothers to read through what he's written before clicking 'PUBLISH'? My kids sometimes tell me I have made grammatical errors in my blog which I usually do not bother to correct. It's very easy to make mistakes in a blog. I sometimes write a long sentence with a singular subject and when I reach the end of the sentence, a thought comes to my mind and I add another noun phrase to the subject but because I don't read through the sentence, I forget to change the verb to a plural verb. These are not errors that stem from one's ignorance. But when a critic says someone is wrong when he is not, the critic is displaying his ignorance of grammar. Or when the Speak Good English Movement wrote a book on grammar and usage and made ridiculous mistakes, its ignorance of English grammar becomes unmistakably clear to readers of the book. 

Of course Ho Ching, like all of us humans, is not immune to careless errors and as a matter of fact, there is one she posted recently but it's an error that is so inconsequential that it would be captious and churlish of anyone to point it out but I'll do it just to dispel the notion that I am in love with her if indeed the highlighting of an insignificant error is evidence of the absence of any amorous feelings. LOL

Here's what Ho Ching wrote on 27 November:

This is an error that is so easy to make if you do not read through what you have written.  It sometimes happens that one confuses an infinitive marker for a preposition or one may be thinking of a phrasal-prepositional verb or more likely, one of those prepositional verbs that are followed by two noun phrases separated by a preposition and one has in mind a prepositional complement instead of an infinitive.

I must say I am strongly tempted to just delete this entire post. But the reader made a silly suggestion and this is a fitting reply to him.