She Said, She Said (or, Nits to Pick)

Regarding this COMPLETELY FUCKING ridiculous story in the Times about a woman who fired her nanny because the nanny’s blog made her uncomfortable and the nanny’s lengthy and impassioned (if somewhat defensive) response, I’m entirely in the nanny’s corner, save for one thing:

The woman is going for a Ph.D. in English Literature and she always uses “its” when she should use “it’s”. That drives me up the fucking wall.

(excellent analysis of the whole shitstorm furball at andrewraff.com, bitch, ph.d., pandagon, and majikthise)

(adding another parenthetical comment: the whole saga sounded very vaguely familiar, in structure if not in detail; apparently my memory is not what it once was, since the august webzine the black table published a rebuttal to a Times “Modern Love” piece, as it happens, just last freakin’ week, proving that not only is there nothing truly new under the sun, but what’s left of my memory is eroding rapidly, developing giant gaping holes like a slice of overripened emmenthaler; I blame the fact that figuring out my fall class schedule required a five-sheet spreadsheet that was put together under the cover of darkness, both metaphorical and literal, for my lack of recall; my brain, faced with the horror of a proposed class schedule of 16.5 hours that includes one block of five hours straight with no single break longer than nine minutes, spasmed with such violence that one could be forgiven for thinking that mighty cthulhu himself (itself? not sure if fictional brain-eating elder gods have gender) had risen from the depths, hungry and looking for sustanance…)