Todd can use very poor grammar. It's not like he does it all the time, but when he does slip into the bad habit, he does it really bad (even worse than mere adjective/adverb confusion--yes, my badly.)
Most of the time, I guess I don't notice. After all, we didn't just start living together yesterday. How could someone as easily perturbed by sloppy grammar end up hitched to a gross offender? Good question.
In college, I went through the typical idealistic rebellion. I could have been snooty. Struggling through school, without a label in which to coddle my dyslexia and A.D.D., I had to work hard to catch up and keep up. In spite of being one of the youngest kids in my class, I managed to graduate from high school a year early. And in spite of my unidentified disabilities, I was invited into my university's elite honors program. The first day of honors philosophy, I was appalled by the smug attitudes of many of my classmates. They seemed incapable of opening their mouths without boasting. It was quite the pretentious show! Before the first week was over, I petitioned to switch to 'regular' classes, which offered a greater variety of choice and classmates who weren't so fake.
So, when I first met Todd, was it a case of me overlooking his poor grammar because I was digging for something deeper? Perhaps. Or was he exercising extreme control over his language usage in order to impress me? Equally likely. Since lust and horniness are blind, I'm not sure I'll ever know the answer to that question.
What I do know is it's been bugging me lately. More and more. Driving me batty, even. I think it's getting worse, and I think it may be purposeful. Yesterday, I overheard him talking on the phone with his mom. "I'd have me a place down around Flatrock..." he said. Now, perhaps my mind zeroed in on the language issue in order to ignore the disturbing content (moving back to hillbilly land--a subject that, as Todd has been informed on more than one occasion, is so troubling to my heart that he'd better not even joke about it.)
Some might say that he was slipping into the language of his Podunk homeland simply because he was speaking with one of its inhabitants. I wouldn't mind so much if that was the only time he did so, but it's not. [And his mother being a school teacher, who likes to flaunt her educational credentials, you'd think he'd watch his language with her.]
Todd's grammatical faux pas bother me the most when he is speaking to the children. I cringe at the thought of them picking up similar speech patterns--not because I'm some sort of a grammar expert, but rather because I know that the way a person speaks can make a lasting impression. I don't want my children to suffer needlessly--to appear stupid or uneducated when they're applying for scholarships and jobs.
You may think I'm being overly critical of Todd. "The poor thing can't help talking the way he was raised, and you're being a snobby, evil woman to make such an issue of this."
The thing is: I don't think it's for want of education that he talks the way he does. He worked in radio for a while (albeit small town radio), and he aspired to be a journalism major. Because of that, he consciously made the decision to shed the southern drawl that was the trademark of his community, and shed it he did. Where there's a will there's a way. That's why I think that he does not have the will to improve his grammar. In his moral system, uneducated people are better people because they aren't snobbishly looking down their noses at those who are "academically inferior" to them. Although I am keenly aware of the presence of snobbery in the world, I think that this attitude has more to do with his own feelings of inadequacy than anything he actually has evidence of others thinking about him.
I think we all make grammatical slip ups. When that happens, some of us laugh and correct ourselves. Some cringe and hope nobody noticed. Some are tired and just don't notice. Others, however, seem to revel in such ill usage, wearing it proudly as a badge of identity.
