Do People Correct Your English?

(Even When They're Wrong?)

I started my teaching career at 21 when I was hired to teach a summer ESL class at my alma mater. It was exhilarating but also a challenge. Because even though I had absorbed rules for grammar and punctuation through years of wildly extensive reading, I had to learn those rules well enough to explain them clearly. Some days I was only a chapter or two ahead of my students in our text, but I got the grounding I needed for future classes and working privately with writers.

As years passed, when new friends or acquaintances asked what I did, I said I was a writer and that I taught English. The second answer almost always inspired someone to comment along the lines of “Jeez—I better watch what I say or you’ll correct me.” And they’d laugh.

I never corrected anyone in a situation like that because it would have been extremely rude, but I have found myself corrected for my own English more than once--even though I was born in the U.S. Just three examples:

I’ve had friends who insisted that it was dead wrong for me to say that I felt “nauseous” rather than “nauseated.” On a subjective level, I always found “nauseated” to sound more formal and less descriptive of what I was feeling. You could call it a question of register.

But the usage of nauseous to mean feeling sick goes back to the early 1600s, so it’s not some contemporary perversion of the language—or a sign of ignorance or the decay of Western Civilization. Originally, there was a distinction between the two adjectives, but I had been taught that both words are correct.

Then there was an English friend who was seriously offended when I said “the hoi polloi” when I meant ordinary people, the masses. She lectured me: “You don’t use ‘the’ because ‘hoi’ means ‘the’ in Greek and so you’re repeating yourself when you say ‘the hoi polloi’!” Maybe so, I replied, but American and English usage are different and equally correct in their own spheres.

Besides, I wasn’t speaking Greek.

And one reviewer snarkily criticized a novel of mine written in first person by claiming that I, as the author, mistook “access” for “excess.” Sadly, she wasn’t well-read enough to know that “access” can mean an attack or outburst of strong emotion. That’s the kind of person we mystery writers love to work into a book one way or another—when we get the chance. :-)

So, substackers, have you ever had your English usage corrected when it wasn’t incorrect? Please share your story in the comments section.

Lev Raphael grew up in a multi-lingual family and speaks French and German best when he’s in a German or French milieu. He has some understanding of Dutch, ditto Swedish which he’s currently studying on Duolingo. He admired Swedish for its music, its comparative simplicity in terms of grammar, and its cognates with French and English. He enjoys Duolingo sentences like “I cannot find my pants”: Jag kan inte hitta mina byxor. He recently passed 210 days in a row of studying Swedish on that app.