Oops! A correction...

Perhaps it's the congenial spirit of the season or perhaps it's months of linguistic study - probably it's just the desire to set a wrong to right - but I want to amend something I made quite a snobby little point of last year when I reviewed a book called Me and Mr Darcy by Alexandra Potter.

How can Potter write Me and Mr Darcy, I asked? Not only is there vulgarity contained within this novel, the author has the grammar wrong! My, what a snotty-nosed little critic I was!

Well...my mistake!

After all, why not Me and Mr Darcy? Do you see a verb there? I don't see a verb there. For all I knew or know this phrase has been picked out of a sentence in which it functions as an object, like, That nervy blogger is writing about me and Mr Darcy, again - a sentence in which 'me and Mr Darcy' is the object of the preposition 'about.'

Oh, Ms Smith - fourth grade English teacher - I should have known better! Did you not teach me grammar if not modesty and sense? With hubris I entered adulthood and stayed there for quite a while culminating in a moment of public criticism in which I implied that this author, poor Ms Potter, doesn't have a proper hold on sentence construction! Like it even matters!

Obviously, if the narrator of the book were saying 'Me and Mr Potter got a thrashing from that blogger again,' then the grammar must be amended by changing the objective 'me' to the nominative 'I.' (And maybe you would want to transpose the two subjects for the sake of politeness.) But who cares?

First, this is the stuff children's grammar lessons are made of. Why pick into such a trivial thing when commenting on a novel, especially when point number two is coming right up. That is, why criticize a paperback with the charge of rudeness when all you have is a noun phrase floating around on its cover? Grammarians of the world, you're obviously not reading my blog if you let that go.

So, I hope I've shown proper contrition for my presumptuous assertion of last year.

One last thing: I may have given off the itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny little suggestion that the book's not very fun. - Oops. - It was actually quite entertaining if a bit bawdy.