A just-released survey from Grammarly, a writing app that corrects spelling and grammatical mistakes, revealed that Brooklyn sports fans are the SIXTH most erudite in the nation! Talk about counter-intuitive.
Grammarly’s annual Pro Sports Power Rankings examine the first five comments posted under articles on each official MLB, NBA and NFL team blog from official sports team and sports fan websites (Think: NFL.com, etc.).
Once they’ve gathered 100 comments for each team in each city, Grammarly’s wordsmiths identify misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words and subject-very disagreement. Phew! That sounds tougher than trying to defend against a last-second Tom Brady drive.
Anyway, Brooklyn fans bested their peers in 35 other cities when it came to the proper use of the English language (which truly boggles the mind).
I asked Grammarly’s experts to explain why America’s self-proclaimed fourth largest city had fared so well.
Michael Mager, who managed the data collection, said, “Our study revealed that NBA fans tended to write more accurately than NFL and MLB fans. Because the Nets are Brooklyn’s only professional team, it’s likely that’s why they appeared higher in the rankings.” Now, there’s a comment that HAS to warm the heart of Spike Lee.
Some of the survey’s other cool findings included:
– Fans in Tennessee managed to come in both first (Memphis) and last (Nashville). I’ve got to believe country music’s inane lyrics had some effect on Nashville’s dismal performance.
– Philadelphia dropped from fifth to 25th place… because of Phillies fans. That comes as no surprise to me. What DOES surprise me is Philadelphia’s excellent performance in 2014. Talk about an outlier.
I’m pumped about Brooklyn’s strong finish. It really puts to bed the long-standing belief that, while the old Brooklyn Dodgers fans were among the most ardent in baseball history, they were also considered semi- illiterate (i.e. They nicknamed their team Dem Bums, etc.).
The surviving members of the now defunct Brooklyn baseball team Roger Kahn dubbed ‘The Boys of Summer’ are probably waving their A.P. Style Guides in salute.
Hilda Chester is rolling over in her grave! How could this be?
I suppose using the Chicago Manual of Style is out of the question!
Isn’t this a small sampling Steve? With e-mail, word limitations on Twitter, etc. people are in a hurry to get things written. Is this a true reflection? Also, they are going to use just the first 100. Suppose some idiot is a die-hard sports fan yet can’t spell worth crap and of those 100 in the sampling, 20 are his posts?