'The Great Unwashed'

I poke fun at a lot of the e-mails I get from people who read my column. But the truth is that most of the e-mails I get are perfectly lovely notes from seemingly lovely people. And because nice, reasonable, pleasant letters don’t hold much entertainment value, I don’t blog about them.

If you searched the archives on this site, you might get the impression that the people who write to me are all a little off. But, really, most of them are pretty great.

Then there’s Bert.

Bert, not his real name, lives in Newport Beach, Calif., where he reads my column in his local community news insert to the L.A. Times. He writes to me from time to time, always seemingly under the assumption that he has something to say that I'll agree with.

All the ideas Bert has ever communicated to me boil down to one message:. He and I are better than most people. His reasons have to do with grammar. Though I can’t help but wonder if my column were about gardening, politics, education, cooking, chess, relationship advice, or any of a million other topics, he’d find in them some reason to look down on others.

I used to be nice to Bert, giving him the kid glove treatment in e-mails that explain why he’s wrong. But then Bert wrote this:

“These days, the great unwashed seem to be convinced that I is classier than me, no matter its position in a sentence or phrase.  Of course, me all to often becomes the subject (Me and Jim went.)  ... Ugh!

“I have a New Yorker cartoon that shows two men, one of whom says (in the caption), 'You have no idea what it’s like to be a just between you and me person in a just between you and I world.” ...

“I’m a grammatical traditionalist and a curmudgeonly Professor Emeritus [state university name omitted].”

While there are many things that might strike you about this message (including the misspelling of “too”), here’s what most struck me: the juxtaposition of the words “the great unwashed” and “professor.” A man so critical of people whose grammar skills he considers subpar that he calls them “the great unwashed” is ... an educator.

An educator who looks down on the uneducated.

Gross, Bert. Truly gross.

 

 

 

 

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 6th, 2014 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.