Grammar sticklers may have OCD

 In the past, many people believed that correcting other people’s grammar was simply rude and unnecessary. However, in this article, Dennis Baron tries to explain that the actions some of these people may be justified. There is now evidence that they are actually ill, suffering from a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder or oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Prior to this discovery, scientists had found a grammar gene (technically named the FOXP2 gene), which may be responsible for a number of “grammatical ills,” including the incapability to form complex sentences or to correctly use the passive voice. There is now evidence that there is an alternative form of this gene called FOXP2.1 that may actually cause some of us to obsessively correct other people’s grammar. The article continues to talk about the two researchers who are spearheading this study and writing in the current issue of the Journal of Syntactic Cognition. L. Malevich and H.D. Lo studied the fMRIs of self-diagnosed grammar sticklers as they were exposed to a variety of solecisms ranging from “split infinitives and sentence-final prepositions to phrases like between you and I and apple’s $2.49 a bag. The two researchers found that those being studied showed markers of brain activity also commonly observed in OCD/ODD patients. There is a new push to add this disorder to the DSM-5, the latest edition of the standard catalogue of psychological disorders, scheduled for publication this year. These new findings seem to have complicated this already controversial issue, especially with Bob Lowth, founder and president of the Society for the Propagation of Pure English (SPoPE). He strongly objects to this kind of medicalization of grammatical correction saying, “It’s bad English that’s sick, not correcting it. I suppose the next thing is that workers will want health insurance coverage for their misplaced modifiers.” While this discovery was the first step in correcting this medical ill, it goes a long way towards “finding, explaining, and helping us deal with, their obsession with enforcing on the hapless public an idiosyncratic and often undertheorized idea of what’s right or wrong in speech and writing.” He closes the article in saying that if defining this societal faux pas as a psychological syndrome helps us find a cure, then ultimately both society and language itself stands to benefit. I find this article and the entire study fascinating because this discovery really seems to throw a twist into the very controversial issue of correcting other people’s grammar.

Do you believe that this new discovery gives people that suffer from this illness the right to correct grammar? Should scientists be working on treatment for this? Or is it something trivial that should not be worried about?