Wall of Shame: Grammer versus Grammar

It is one thing for students to write grammer and quite another to find it written as such in a textbook, which is exactly what happened to me last year in one of my literature textbooks. I can still see it on the page: grammer. What an abomination! No wonder so many of my students couldn't spell it!

I started a mini-campaign in my classroom and had students repeat the mantra, "There is no me in grammar!" When I shared this story with a friend who is as geeky as I (yes, that's the correct pronoun), he corrected me with the following explanation of grammer:

I'm afraid your aversion to "grammer" is lost on me. It's a perfectly good word:

gram•mer (noun)

1. One who makes or has made a living delivering singing telegrams, candygrams, etc.

2. One who has a love for the metric system (esp. as it relates to measurements of mass) and who feels a strong compulsion to convert measurements made in any other system to metric.

3. (dialect) A variant form of "grandma." ("...that was after we got back from Grammer's and Papper's house."