So much of my nerdiness, I learned from the Baby-Sitters Club

It's no secret that I'm a big fat grammar geek, and that many of my pet peeves relate to incorrect usage. A quick overview of the biggies:

-- If you feel sick, you're "nauseated," NOT "nauseous." If you're nauseous, it means that you're making other people sick. Which happens, of course, but in general most people don't want to own up to it, so people almost never use "nauseous" correctly.

-- A "dialogue" is between two people only; more than two participants means it's a discussion or a conversation. And also, it is not a verb.

-- I don't care how commonly it's used, or how many dictionaries have caved and said it's okay: "impact" is not a verb, and "impactful" is just not a word, and it makes my ears bleed, so please knock it off.

Anyway, now that that's out of the way....Lately, Minnams and I have been noticing how often people misuse the word "hopefully." For example, in a meeting this morning, someone said something like, "Hopefully, this project will be successful." What she really should have said is, "I hope this project will be successful," because "hopefully" is an adverb, and it does not mean "it is hoped." A more proper usage would be, for example, "'Santa's coming tonight, right?' he asked hopefully."

I first learned this from the Baby-Sitters Club books. Yeah, you heard me.

I was a huge, huge BSC fan growing up; in fact, in sixth grade, my friends and I formed our own baby-sitters' club, which was hugely unsuccessful, but we had like 10 meetings and made up fliers and stuff, and got like one call, ever. Anyway, for those of you not in the know, the original books focused on four friends in Connecticut who formed a baby-sitting club: tomboyish, mouthy Kristy, the president; artsy, free-spirited Claudia, the VP; shy, bookish, sheltered, motherless Mary Anne, the secretary; and worldly, diabetic, transplanted-from-NYC Stacey, the treasurer. Other club members were added over time, but the first few books focused just on these four.

Claudia clashed fairly regularly with her older sister Janine, who was impossibly nerdy and socially awkward. Janine constantly corrected Claudia's grammar, which Claudia found infuriating, but from which I actually learned a lot. In addition to the "hopefully" lesson, Janine taught me that "continue on" is redundant. I'm sure there were others, but those are the two that have stayed with me 16 years later.

One last thing about the Baby-Sitters Club books: the members of the BSC were responsible for writing in a journal of some sort to report on their baby-sitting experiences, and most of the chapters started off with one of the character's entries, in her own handwriting. I wondered how they managed to do that, with such a consistent look; was it someone's job to channel Claudia's chicken scratch, and someone else's to perfect Mary Anne's schoolteacherish cursive?

One of my high school English teachers had taken a job at Scholastic, which published the BSC books, and when I posed that question to her, she actually forwarded my email to Ann M. Martin, author of the BSC books!! Which made me hysterical and embarrassed, but Ann M. Martin was absolutely lovely in her response, in which she said that there was one person in the art department who'd been responsible for hand-writing all of those entries. What a sucky job. Maybe by now they're using some computer program to apply different fonts, if those books are still being cranked out; I hope so.