[FreeBeacon] Grammar Nazis suck. We all know this. Most Grammar Nazis are quarantined into editor positions where their evil can be best contained and used for good, but many exist in the wild. Most recently, 61-year-old retired teacher Yvonne Mason went viral and earned widespread media coverage for correcting a series of grammatical errors in a White House letter sent under Donald Trump's name, and promising to mail it back.As bad as Grammar Nazis are, incompetent Grammar Nazis might be the worst people alive. It's bad enough to act like an annoying pedant, but doing it wrong ensures that the rest of us have to also become annoying pedants in order to correct your misinformation. Bad Grammar Nazis are the zombies of discourse, spreading their infection to the healthy.
Alas, Mason is a bad Grammar Nazi. And the media fell for it, hard.
The bulk of her complaints (eleven of the fifteen, by my count) are the White House's capitalization of words like "federal," "nation" and "president." "Federal is capitalized only when used as part of a proper noun," she complains, adding at the end "OMG this is WRONG!"
But as the New York Times noted in its story on the letter:
However, a style manual for the federal government calls for capitalizing "Nation" and "Federal" when the words are used as a synonym for the United States. It says "State" should be capitalized when it is referring to the government or legislature. In letters from Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush that constituents posted online, words like "Nation" and "President" are capitalized.
So right off the bat, we learn that the vast majority of "errors" in the Trump letter are not. And The New York Times discovered this fact and subsequently wrote up the story… why exactly?
More at the link