When grammar lessons work too well...

your eye starts twitching at people saying things incorrectly.

Growing up, my dad made sure that we, the children, knew certain grammatical things. If speaking of something was not, but we wish were so or posing a hypothetical, you used the subjunctive ("I wish I were a hamster" or "If she were a hamster, would her husband smell of elderberries?"). You used "fewer" for things you could count (like grocery items) and "less" for things that were continuous or semi-continuous (fluids or minute granules like sugar). There was a lesson about the different between "lend" and "loan" that I never learned very well**, probably because it came up infrequently. But most of all, we learned that "impact" was not a verb. A tooth could be impacted or something could have an impact. Those were the two acceptable uses.*

I may have learned the last lesson a little too well, because my right eye has literally started twitching when people use it incorrectly. Yesterday, someone on the radio described Sherlock Holmes as 'impactful' and my eye started twitching. It has not yet stopped twitching, on and off, a full day later.

This may be a problem.

~AMPH

* Slowly "impact" seems to be morphing into an acceptable verb in the same way the subjunctive case is being lost. I refuse to acknowledge either, because I am a curmudgeonly old schoolteacher grandma in a 24 year-old physicist's body.

**Apparently, my sister learned this one, but none of the others. Lend is a verb, loan is a noun. I can lend you a loan, but I cannot loan you anything. It makes as much grammatical sense to use loan as a verb as it would  to use chair as a verb.