Does bad grammar make you angry? Finally, an explanation why.

Nothing quicken the blood faster then grammar mistake.

How did that last sentence — with its three errors — make you feel?

Did your heart rate change? Did you feel stressed? Did the world seem suddenly off balance?

If the answer to all of those questions is no, you can move on to reading something else because this column isn’t for you.

For the rest of you, I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: Science can now explain why we — people who write grammar columns, and people who love them — are like this.

A new study in the Journal of Neurolinguistics from researchers at the University of Birmingham found that, when certain people come across grammar errors, their bodies respond physically.

Heart rates change. Stress increases. Bad grammar activates the part of our nervous system that provokes the fight-or-flight impulse we get when being chased … like by a tiger. All of that happens when we encounter someone breaking grammar rules. To some of us, it can feel like an attack.

Heart rates change. Stress increases.

No wonder apostrophes can make us angry.

The researchers observed 41 people’s bodies while those subjects listened to short English speech samples, some of which contained grammatical errors, such as, “I think that culture is one of the areas most affected by a globalization,” and “People all around the world listen to same music, watch the same movies, and read same books.”

The impacts of the errors were significant.

“There is a cardiovascular response to the violation of regularities that can be observed in language,” the authors write, and that “cardiovascular response becomes stronger as the violations become more frequent.”

» READ MORE: Yes, ‘bacteria,’ ‘data,’ and ‘agenda’ are all technically plural. But don’t be annoying about it. | The Grammarian

The affliction is widespread. When we learn a language, we intuit its rules and usage patterns. Even the clumsiest speaker knows and follows most of the language’s constrictions; those of us interested in a grammar column tend to be quibbling over just a handful of rules. When that average speaker hears or reads sentences that deviate from what they’ve learned language is supposed to sound like, the reaction is visceral and physiological.

What’s more, the study showed that our human language instincts aren’t xenophobic (unlike our terrible immigration policies). The researchers tested if the accent of the speaker in the sound clips made a difference. Turns out, those physiological responses were less severe when study subjects heard someone with a foreign accent (in this case, Polish) making grammatical mistakes.

That suggests participants expected a non-native speaker to make more grammatical mistakes and were more forgiving of those mistakes. Hearing a foreign speaker didn’t itself affect their heart rate. (Yes, the study subjects were all British, but we can extrapolate the lessons from xenophobic Brits to xenophobic Americans. It’s not like the country of Brexit is so much friendlier to foreigners than the U.S. is.)

So there’s a scientific explanation for why bad grammar makes us angry. That’s the good news.

The bad news: It’s biology. It’s instinct. It’s the tiger that won’t stop chasing us.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world. Send comments, questions, and indefinite articles to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.