she don't have no tact.

"...and she didn't have no money," my brother concludes the story, which I remember as being amusing, though I don't recall what it was about.

"She didn't have any money," corrects my niece. Her dad doesn't hear her, which is probably just as well, because I could imagine his expression.

"Don't correct your dad," I said with my "silly scolding face," that is, an expression which mixes disapproval with a smile, so I don't come off as too severe.

"It makes you seem stupid when you use bad grammar," she replied.

I sigh and feel as if I'm talking to my former self. At her age, twelve, I definitely would have corrected my own father for using a double negative. I can picture his expression, too. It says, "you're missing the point." People would tell me that it was rude to correct another person's speech. I didn't care and considered it a public service to help people understand how to speak correctly, because I was an arrogant little snot. I know that I used the exact excuse that using bad grammar made you look stupid.

And that is completely true. People, and not just jerks like me, judge your intelligence by the way that you speak. But when you use that excuse to justify correcting someone in a casual social settings, what you are really saying is, "I am judging your intelligence by the way that you speak, and honey, it doesn't look good."

At some point, I was finally convinced that it was rude to correct the grammar of others in any setting where you don't have authority (which for me, is pretty much everywhere). And so I stopped correcting people. Out loud, anyway. In my head, I could hear a stifled voice sigh, "She didn't have any money." Sometimes that little voice got out if I was in a bad mood or just didn't feel like exerting the will power to be polite.

My ex-boyfriend tried for years to break me of this habit, telling me it was terribly disrespectful. He was right, of course. It hurts the other person's feelings, makes them feel stupid, and indicates that you're not really listening to what they're saying because you're so hung up on how they're saying it.

But of course, I didn't listen to him. I struggled to stifle myself because I understood that people didn't like me because of it, but I didn't really understand why I shouldn't do it. But somehow over the past few years, I finally got it. I don't know how or when it happened, just that when I heard my niece correct my brother, I realized that I didn't do that anymore. What happened is that I met a bunch of smart people who didn't speak the way their hassled english teachers taught them to. I knew these people were intelligent enough to know the rules, and so they must be ignoring the rules on purpose. As free-thinking individuals, they have the right to do so.

I still notice when a subject and verb don't agree. But it's more like noticing that someone has a foreign accent. They don't speak the way that I'm used to hearing, but I understand them, so there is no problem.

I wonder if I will be able to convince my niece to stop correcting people. She knows it's rude, and that hasn't stopped her. I know she believes in her dad's intelligence, and I could explain that he is choosing to speak that way because it's more natural to him. Maybe that would work. If not, I'll just tell her that it will make boys not like her, and that should get her through puberty. Hopefully by then, she'll have figured it out on her own.