Grammar Girl here. The full name of this podcast is Grammar Girl's quick and

dirty tips for better writing, and part of better writing is making sure your

sources are credible. So this week we're going to look at a particularly well-done

grammar hoax and see how you could have avoided falling for it. About six

weeks ago a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois

named Dennis Barron posted an article on his university hosted blog that at

first glance looked like a press release about a scientific study showing that

grammar sticklers have obsessive-compulsive disorder. The article begins

quote, it used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other

people's grammar were just plain annoying. Now there's evidence they're

actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder slash

oppositional defiant disorder, OCD slash ODD. Researchers are calling it

grammatical pedantry syndrome or GPS. It goes on to talk about a real gene known

to be involved in language processing or development, Fox P2. It shows

supposed brain scans comparing the different responses of people with and

without the made up Fox P2 variant. And it even goes so far is to include a

properly formatted citation to the fictitious journal of syntactic cognition

in which Barron imagines the article would have been published. What a

delicious story that would have been if it were true and if you only read the

headline the first paragraph or two and glanced at the rest you could be

forgiven for believing it was true. I first became aware of the article when it

was forwarded to me by someone on Twitter who indeed thought it was real. As I

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