"The Atheist" and The Grammar Nazi

 

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/the-atheist-and-grammar-nazi.html

I know that many posters to English language groups do not have English as their first language, and I am not a grammar Nazi, but here are some tips to help you avoid irritating your readers if you can understand the following.

Proper nouns are names of specific things such as "Christianity" and "Donald Trump".

Improper nouns are non specific, such a "religion" and "con-artist".

Proper nouns always start with a capital letter.

Improper nouns do not, unless they are the first word of a sentence.

Most plurals in English end with an "s". There are exceptions, such as "children", "oxen", "women" and "men". 

The exceptions are clues that English is not a pure, respectable language, but a creole - a pidgin language that emerged from a time when people who spoke different languages needed to communicate with one another. The "en" ending comes from northern Europe. The "s" comes from the Southern Europe. Other English words come from Arabic and from the Indian languages.

Expressions such as "the atheist" or even worse, "the evolutionist" immediately come across as bigoted. It is like talking about "the black man". What "black man"? What's his name? Where does he come from? Does he really represent a whole "race"?

These forms of expression smack of conceptualising whole groups of people as a single entity, taking no regard of the diversity there will be within the group. "White" Mildred gets lumped in with "white" Karen merely because they are both "white". The fact that they are at the opposite ends of any spectrum you care to mention becomes irrelevant. The sins of all Mildreds are the same as the sins of Karen.

Thank you for your attention.