March 4th is National Grammar Day, the only day of the year that’s a complete sentence: “March forth.”
Except that calling March 4th a complete sentence is grammatically incorrect, which is not a good look for National Grammar Day.
To turn March 4th into a sentence you have to equate the ordinal fourth with the adverbial forth. On any other day, the grammar sticklers might say that’s worse that verbing a noun. But on National Grammar Day, anything goes.
Technically, March 4th isn’t a sentence, it’s a noun. But things that look like nouns can function as other things as well. March 4th is a noun that’s also an adverb of time. In addition, March 4th can be a sentence. So can March 1st.
March 1st is both a noun and a complete sentence. As a sentence, March 1st either tells you to be the first person to march, before anyone else, or it orders you to march first, before doing something else. That works with every other day in March as well: Be the second to march, the third, the fourth, and so on.
National Grammar Day is all about quibbling, so if you really want to quibble, March should really be National Grammar Month. But it’s best to limit our grammar celebration to just one day. Americans are quick to correct other people’s mistakes, but they won’t stand for a whole month of being corrected.
So back to National Grammar Day, which is just one day. You’ve heard of red-letter days. Well, National Grammar Day is a red-pen day, a day to correct other people’s grammar.
Reverse snobbery: Someone took a red pen to the Express Checkout sign at a Chicago-area Whole Foods and turned the pretentious “10 items or fewer” into the way everybody says it, “10 items or less.”
Of course people correct grammar on other days as well. On November 29, 2024, the political commentator David Pakman insisted that Bluesky “would be a tough platform for a lot of the Twitter trolls because spelling and grammar are generally correct here.”
The day that I viewed it, Pakman’s post had drawn more than 20,000 likes and 900-plus comments, suggesting that many Bluesky users agree that their grammar and politics are superior to the right-wing cybertruckers still on X/Twitter. (Truth in advertising: I was one of those who quit Twitter for Bluesky.)
But there’s no necessary correlation between grammar and politics. Anyone can mis-type, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, and even though digital writing technologies make correction a snap, they also make it easy to miss an erroneous autocorrect.
As for using grammatical correctness to indicate right-thinking on the socials: You can’t edit a post on Bluesky or on X/Twitter, and even the most-careful writer, left, right, or center, has uploaded something with an embarrassing error that went undetected until it was too late.
Whatever side you’re on, it’s also a mistake to use good grammar as a sign of trustworthiness. Here’s an example. We’ve been conditioned to believe that scammers, who are supposed to operate out of vampire-infested Eastern Europe, use bad English in their clumsy attempts to get us to disclose our bank details.
But the British department store giant Marks & Spencer fell victim to a ransomware attack because the hackers used flawless English in their phishing schemes. The con artists were Americans and Brits, not English-challenged Borises and Natashas. The hackers' mastery of standard English convinced the IT crowd at Marks & Sparks to let them reset "forgotten" passwords, whereupon they were able to paralyze the retailer’s operations for weeks, which cost the firm as much as half a billion pounds.
More generally, despite the smugness of those who believe they’ve mastered all the rules, it’s a mistake to use someone’s spelling, punctuation, and grammar as a test of their intelligence. Remember, the most dangerous ideas may be framed in impeccable standard English.
So on National Grammar Day, don’t get out your marker and correct a sign in a grocery store that says less instead of fewer or “apple’s $2.69 a pound.” And don’t lecture your friends about the difference between literally and figuratively. You’ll wind up facing a charge of vandalism, literally friendless and alone.
On National Grammar Day, let’s just forget about complete sentences – we can’t define them very well anyway. We can’t even define what a word is without tripping over all sorts of exceptions and counterexamples. As linguists like to say, “all grammars leak,” which basically means there are no rules without significant exceptions.
Instead, let’s make National Grammar Day a time to celebrate the diversity, inventiveness, and flexibility of human language.
And if you disagree that’s fine, just so long as you remember my own National Grammar Day rule:
Everybody wants to be correct . . . but nobody wants to be corrected.
