Cross-posted at The Smew
REGINA, SK—Dr. Heinrich Haussmann, 94, became famous in his later years for being the curmudgeonly creator of the wildly popular grammar column “Sieg Semicolon, Heil Hyphen!” Now the eccentric Doktor, who was well known for his love of Wagner and experiments on animals, is known for another thing: having once been a member of the Nazi Party in Germany.
Haussmann’s secret came out when Saul Durrell, 41, a sharp-eyed reader of the column who just happens to work for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, saw something in Hausmann’s May 4th, 2011 column entitled “Irregardless Is Not A Word Just Like Poland Is Not A Country.”
In the column, Hausmann pointed out that ‘irregardless,’ along with splitting infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition, were “mistakes that the true Übermenschen would never make in a thousand years of the Reich!”
“There was something about that statement that seemed suspicious to me,” said Durrell, “so I did some research.” It turned out that Haussmann had left Germany in 1945, moving first to Argentina and then to Canada in the late 60s where he started his German Shepherd breeding company, Aryan Blood Lines.
“Slowly all the pieces began to fit,” said Durrell, “the obsessive concerns about the use of the semi-colon, pedantic scolding on trivial things like the proper use of ‘penultimate’ and worst of all his ravings about ‘between you and I’. This was, in hindsight, clearly a sign of a deeper fascist nature,” said Durrell.
Fortunately, Dr. Hausmann will now have to answer for his crimes: he’s awaiting deportation and trial in Israel. Said Durrell: “Finally this monster will see justice. And the rest of us will be spared his smug little pronouncements on ‘correct’ grammar. I mean, get a clue jerk and look up the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar before you shoot your mouth off.”
“In an Israeli prison.”