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You know you're getting old when you want to slap a young person for saying, "Me and her went to the mall." Or when you get riled up because a friend who knows you rescue cats gives you a large paw-print magnet with the words printed on it: "Who Rescued Who?"

You stare at the magnet. It's cute and thoughtful, but you can't help hearing your fourth grade teacher Mrs. Meyer's melodious voice in your head crying, "No, no. It's supposed to be "Who Rescued Whom? Well, of course it is. What's this world coming to?

Let's face it - proper grammar is the last refuge of geezers.

Dammit, we know what's right! I may not know how to hack into the NSA computers, but I can diagram the hell out of this sentence.

In my day, a hush of reverence enveloped the diagramming of an English sentence. Why, if you could diagram, you could conquer the world!

Whenever Mrs. Youngberg, my seventh-grade English teacher, sought a volunteer to diagram a particular sentence on the blackboard, I would thrust up my hand and walk quickly to the front of the class. Grabbing the chalk, my hands a flurry of anticipation, I'd diagram the subject/predicate/noun/verb/adverb/adjective, just like that. I Am Diagrammer, Hear Me Roar!

In my bones, I know that this is THE right way to understand a sentence, so you can imagine my consternation when Steve, my live-in linguist sweetheart, casually mentions to me over lunch one day that those beloved Reed Kellogg diagrams are passé, that "they don't represent the language as it really is."

"Syntactic trees," he says in his most professorial tone, "are the only way to provide a visual representation of the underlying structure of a sentence." He takes a sip of Earl Grey.

"Balderdash!" I cry in churlish response, fiddling with my spoon.

"Well, you can say 'Balderdash' all you like, but it's true. A syntactic tree shows the hierarchical relationships that take place between the constituents of a sentence. The old diagrams just don't."

"What do your poor students think about this?" I say, leaning back in my chair. Steve teaches in the TESOL (Teaching English as a Second Language) program at a local university. Linguistics is one of the required courses.

"They get all nostalgic and defensive about the Old Way," he says and reaches for a scone.

"Well, of course. They think they're special because they were the big dogs of diagramming in their day. But you come along with your fancy-pants syntactic trees and tell them that everything they have believed all their lives is wrong."

"That's right," he says.

"Can't you see how this undermines their entire world view? I mean, if they were wrong about diagramming, what else might they be wrong about? It's too much to bear."

We stare at each other across the kitchen table.

"They hate you, don't they?" I say.

"Afraid so."

"You know what you are? You're the Grammatical Anti-Christ!"

"Yes. But what they hate even more is that I have fun with this stuff."

"Well, then," I say, standing up and planting my hands on my hips. "On behalf of all your students, I feel compelled to say: How 'bout you take your syntactic trees and shove 'em, sweetheart. We know what we know, and no one's going to take our sacred diagrams away from us, you hear?"

Call me juvenile, but someone's got to hold the line.

- Rosie Sorenson

Rosie Sorenson is the award-winning author of They Had Me at Meow: Tails of Love from the Homeless Cats of Buster Hollow. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and others. In 2007, she won an honorable mention in the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition.