This is absolutely true. Even the most dignified, grown professional man could be stunned into an embarrassed silence, suddenly looking for all the world like a chastened six-year-old. He would take an inadvertent step back, and quickly find some excuse to scuttle out the door.

Oh, yes. My grandmother was most definitely a prescriptive grammarian.

Thanks for the note about quote marks. I was copying and pasting from Word which automatically used curly quotes. I'll see if I can adjust the settings.

Ummmm, ...CK?

I know I'm a rank newbie, but is the system supposed to allow me to edit my own sentences? When I click on it to edit I just get a big black X.

Ah, yes. Using Chrome let me in.

For the record, I fully approve of the fact that this site is a repository for real-world, descriptive, natural language as it is actually used by native speakers. That's the very attribute that will make this a valuable resource for so many uses and applications.

Any prescriptive grammarians out there already have plenty of rule books they can point to.

My grandmother was a fearsome woman. Even my grandfather was afraid of her.

How about adding 3 commas?

FROM:
My formidable grandmother was such a stickler for language that whenever she heard someone ask "Can I…" she would interrupt and snap back at them, "I don't know, can you? If you don't know yourself how would I know what you're capable of? If you're asking permission say 'May I…' "

TO:
My formidable grandmother was such a stickler for language that whenever she heard someone ask "Can I...," she would interrupt and snap back at them, "I don't know, can you? If you don't know yourself, how would I know what you're capable of? If you're asking permission, say 'May I...'"

In the sentence above, I also changed "…" (1 character) to "..." (3 characters) and omitted the space between the quotation marks at the end, since it seems to be the preferred style here. I'm not sure if these changes are necessary, though.

I…' " -> I…'"