Dictionary Editor Spends Entire Thanksgiving Correcting Relatives' Grammar, Uninvited From Christmas

Copy editor and amateur lexicographer Dr. Stanley Diacritical has been formally uninvited from his family's Christmas gathering following what relatives described as 'a Thanksgiving characterized entirely by unsolicited corrections.' The first correction occurred before the meal, when Dr. Diacritical interrupted his aunt's grace to note that the phrase 'for which we are thankful' ended with a preposition, a point he spent four minutes elaborating on before his mother asked him to 'just let us eat.' 'I was technically wrong about the preposition,' Dr. Diacritical later conceded. 'Stranding a preposition is perfectly acceptable in English and has been since at least the 17th century. Churchill never actually said the thing about prepositions. I know this. I don't know why I said it. Something about Thanksgiving activates my prescriptivist impulses.' Subsequent corrections included informing his nephew that 'irregardless' is 'a word, but a controversial one'; telling his brother-in-law that 'between you and I' should be 'between you and me' because the preposition governs the objective case; and interrupting a football commentary to note that 'literally' was being used as an intensifier rather than in its primary sense. 'He corrected the dog,' said his sister. 'The dog barked and he said, "That's an interjection, not a sentence." He corrected a dog.' The formal disinvitation was delivered by email on November 29, in a message that Dr. Diacritical critiqued for containing 'two comma splices and a misused semicolon,' feedback he sent as a reply-all. Dr. Diacritical has accepted the disinvitation with what he describes as 'equanimity,' noting that he plans to spend Christmas 'reading the OED and not being told to stop reading the OED.'