The language vultures are circling, awaiting the last gasp of grammar.

But in the proper suburbs of Pittsburgh, subject and verb are in blissful agreement, semicolons know their place and participles do not dangle.

That is where the Grammar Lady dispenses advice, raising comma consciousness and ladling out correct spellings of such stumpers as V-I-C-H-Y-S-S-O-I-S-E.

"I like this stuff," says the Grammar Lady, who is Mary Newton Bruder in private life. "But I'm very aware that not everyone does."

She refers not to the cold soup of pureed leeks but to the rules of language that are her meat and drink. Fortified with texts, primers and an occasional cookbook, Bruder is spoon-feeding grammar to the hordes who suffer from malnutrition of the English language.

And the masses are lapping it up. The Grammar Lady Web site draws about 400 hits weekly. The telephone at the Grammar Hotline (800-279-9708) jangles at least 20 times a day, 9-5, Monday through Friday.

To those who say grammar is an outdated notion, Bruder offers a piece of her mind.

"If you use English badly and you go to get a job, people will make assumptions about you," she says. "Those assumptions will not be good."

When it comes to errors, even the Grammar Lady is past perfect – but not tense. Every once in a great while, a reader points out a mistake in her newspaper column. The vast majority of them are typesetting goofs, but Bruder shoulders responsibility for them nonetheless.

"I just apologize," she says. Although it is difficult to pinpoint precisely when Bruder was a girl – she describes her age as "over 50 but not near retirement by a long shot" – she grew up in an era when grammar ruled the English class. She is also profoundly grateful to her high school French teacher – Ruth Whiting of Homer, N.Y. – for her stringent guidelines on word usage. Student and teacher correspond to this day.

Alas, the teaching of grammar has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with jarring consequences.

"We have a whole generation of people who don't know what's right and what's wrong," the Grammar Lady says.

Indeed, even Bruder defers to a world in which some correct responses sound pretentious rather than educated.

For example, when she answers the telephone and a caller asks for the Grammar Lady, Bruder replies, "Speaking."

Technically speaking, the appropriate response would be "It is I."

"But that sounds stilted," Bruder confides. "So I try to get around it."

Nevertheless, rules are rules. The Grammar Lady is possessive about apostrophes. And the practice of ending a sentence with a preposition ticks her off.

Occasionally, a blooper makes Bruder leap from her easy chair.

Witness an appearance by computer czar Bill Gates on NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.

Discussing his success, Gates said: "My parents provided a very good education for both my sister and I."

The correct phrase, of course, is "my sister and me." "I didn't hear another word of the report," Bruder recalls. "I was appalled."

Before she became the Grammar Lady, Bruder studied Romance languages at Alfred University in her native New York state. She taught high school English and French in New York and Massachusetts, and linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh.

She started the hot line in 1988 for a now-defunct literacy group; the line is now sponsored by Chatham College.

The Grammar Lady feels dreadful when she hears phrases that are polluting the conversational mainstream.

For example, the normally well-spoken Oprah Winfrey frequently intones: "I feel badly." That means the talk-show host has a poor sense of touch.

"We may have to take on Oprah," she says, noting that the correct phrase is "I feel bad."

Bruder is becoming a media maven as well. Her syndicated column appears in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Free Press newspapers, where she gets the scoop on gerunds, modifiers and predicate nominatives.

Although she has clarified them many times before, the Grammar Lady also serves up the bits of usage people find most difficult to digest, such as the difference between lay and lie.

"I lie down to take a nap," Bruder says patiently. "But yesterday, I lay down to take a nap because lay is the past tense of lie."

There is a time, too, to lay to rest some tenets of grammar. The Grammar Lady refers to the long-revered and much-reviled practice of parsing sentences – breaking down the various words and clauses to determine their grammatical relationship, represented graphically by diagramming.

"A student from West Virginia University called one time and desperately wanted to know the function of 'to eat her dinner' in the sentence 'She was too tired to eat her dinner,' " Bruder remembers.

The solution: "To eat her dinner" acts as an adverb, completing the phrase "too tired."

Orthodox grammarians argue that such exercises are essential to learning proper usage. The Grammar Lady says that is arcane. The hard-liners doth protest too much.