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The Grammatical Rant |
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About Me Diaries Photos
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OK, the biggest issue of all the big issues.
Grammar. Don’t look at me like that.
I don’t understand why most of the world has become so stupid. Some bright spark scientist proudly told the world that “as long as the first and last letters of the word are right, people will understand”. I wish he hadn’t. People seem to be taking this too much to heart. The paper informed me that other day that some Z-list celebrity had “spilt” with her boyfriend. Spilt what? An ad in the paper offered a saddle for “£900, except £500.” I blame the spell-checker. It may correct annoying misplaced letters in words like ‘definitely’ (although I’ve discovered that a lot of people who do this assume the spell-checker is wrong), but if you use your instead of you’re it won’t do a thing. I often rib my boyfriend about his inability to spell. He replies, “I’ve got a spell-checker.” It doesn’t do him a blind bit of good, as his most persistent mistake is to mix up to and too. By some amazing stroke of genius he uses them the wrong way every time. There’s that, and there’s his habit of saying things like “I would’ve went if I hadn’t missed the bus.” The spell-checker makes people too confident. They run their work through the spell-checker, and if none of the wiggly red lines come up they think it must be fine. So should you attempt to correct them, they whinge, “but the spell-checker said!” like a Fundamentalist with a Bible. Very few people nowadays understand the apostrophe. Alarmingly, a lot of people seem to think its sole purpose is to indicate the presence of an S. Regularly you see “the dog hurt it’s paw.” This says “the dog hurt it is paw” and makes NO SENSE! Big signs outside cafes and the like say, in big proud letters: “Doughnut’s 80p!” Who is Doughnut and what is she doing with this 80p? Either that or the café only has one doughnut. Ugh. This is too tricky for some people to grasp, it seems. An apostrophe does not mean that a word ends in S. An apostrophe indicates possession when the word is a noun - computer’s, Tom’s, China’s, etc. It doesn’t work for pronouns. You don’t write her’s. So you don’t write it’s. It’s is only correct when it is would also fit the sentence. “Computer’s for sale” is not a sentence. This means “computer is for sale.” If you only have one computer to sell, fine, but it’s still a pretty odd way of putting it. “The computer’s hard drive” is a sentence. “The computer’s being repaired” is a sentence. An apostrophe is used when a letter, or letters, are missing from a word. Watch this: Don’t – Do not See what I did there? I saw a birthday card a while back that said “Your 18!” Your eighteen what? Your eighteen cards? Your eighteen cabbages? Your eighteen brain cells? To quote Ross from Friends – “Y-O-U-’-R-E means you are. Y-O-U-R means your!” So, it is you are eighteen but your birthday card. My boyfriend cannot seem to grasp the to/too conundrum, no matter how many times I say: “Too means also, or excessive, as in too much. To is a preposition, as in I went to the cinema.” (Grammar check didn’t understand the previous sentence. It suggested I change “is” to “be”. To be a preposition, young ‘un. I remember this when it was all fields.) There are a few people still clinging onto the idea that sentences ought to make sense. Often we are told “OMG ur sooooooo sad!!!11!” which, I think, speaks for itself. It’s funny that the people who say this can never spell. These are the people who think it’s cool to spell as many words as possible wrongly and to randomly stick capital letters into the middle of words. People who end words with a Z in order to get over the apostrophe question. Example: HeY uM I dUn wAnna b RuDe or Ne ThInG bUt dIs CoMmUnIty Is KiNdA pOintLeSs lIke cuz y hAv iT WheN aLl u LoT r BeIn ToTaL fReAkS n I'M nOt SAYin DaT 2 b MeAn JzT tRuThFul Cuz u LoT lOoK lIkE ToTaL LoSeRz BuT u DuN hAv 2 b I mEan If u LiKe go 2 schOol LiKe dAt ur So goNnA gEt BaShEd n StUff n I mEaN WeLl U'd DeSeRve It But U pRob Dun KnO ThEy GoNna Do ThAt BuT I'M jzt HeRe Cuz NoNe oF u Hav EvA PrOb HaD fRiEnDs n DaTz y U LOt DrEsS n LoOk LiKe WeIrDos N StUfF cUz No-OnE'Ll b Ya FrIeNd bUt iF u WaNt FrIeNdz u JzT goTtA liKe lEaRn 2 LiSteN 2 PrOpeR MuSiC DaTz KeWl n WeAr KeWl CloThEs n ppl'Ll ThInK yA mOrE nOrMal n U'Ll mAkE fRiEnDs If u GeT A LiKe reAl stYlE nOt jzt BeIn DuMb so YeA Im Jzt LeTtiN yA'lL kNo Coz LiKe WheN u GeT 2 ScHoOl u'Ll b LiKe HATed n On dA sTreEtz So Im Jzt BeIn NiCe n All u ShUd LeArn 2 b LiKe KeWl pPl n a BiT mOrE nOrmAl n U'LL mAkE fRieNdS n WoN'T Be NiGelAtEd FrEeeAkz, So YeH... LaTeRrrrrrrrrrrz This was posted in the grammar_nazi community on LiveJournal. Apparently, she is talking about Goths. She is possibly saying, “Hey, um, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but this community is rather pointless. You have set it up because all of you are freaks; and I’m not saying that to be mean – just truthful. All of you look like losers, but you don’t have to be. If you go to school dressed that way you may well get beaten up. You’d deserve it; you probably know you’d get beaten up. I’m here because none of you have ever had friends, and that’s why you dress and look like strange people. Nobody will make friends with you. If you want friends you must learn to listen to proper music and wear better clothes. Others will then think that you are normal and you will be able to make friends if you get a proper style rather than dress like everyone else. I am just letting you know that when you get to school people may well take against you, and the same thing is likely to happen on the street. I am just being pleasant. You should learn to be like the rest of us, a bit more normal, and you’ll make friends. You won’t be (here I am stuck, as I have no clue what a ‘Nigelated freak’ is). Adding this to a previous piece of evidence (I spell like this as a way of expressing myself, you are so boring), I have deduced that people write this way in order to detract from their lack of anything interesting to say. Writing like this is, obviously, the extreme (although, way, way too common) and everybody who writes this way, without exception, is a prize idiot. It’s the language of Pillockdom (see dictionary). Bad grammar creeps up on most people, though, even those who are perfectly able to use four- or five-syllable words. I’ve seen the odd erroneous “it’s” in a lot of people’s writing. And it always pisses me off. Every bloody time. I see it, I go “Argh!” quite loudly. “What’s up?” my brother will say from the floor, where he will be glued to some games console or another. “My car has a puncture in it is tyre!” I will reply crossly. He will either laugh or make a comment about me turning into my father, but this is hardly the point. I don’t understand what makes grammar so incredibly tricky. Most of these people are over sixteen, have taken GCSEs. So they must have memorised quite a bit of the periodic table in their time, they must have read and at least partially understood Romeo and Juliet, and they must have learned, to a basic level, one, two or even three foreign languages. So why, why, why is it so hard to remember where a bloody apostrophe goes??? Please tell me. Please. I shall leave you with a lovely example of someone who doesn’t even know what an apostrophe is. I once had this conversation on MSN with a friend. Me: The punctuation Nazi sentences you to twelve thousand
apostrophes. |