Spinster

This is going to a long and rather vicious tirade about grammar and spelling and the general inattention paid to both, particularly on the internet. (Aundra: I am in no way judging you for your spelling. I accepted it a long time ago.)

I check out a lot of crafting blogs and forums, and I am forever coming across atrocious grammar and spelling. This stuff exists in real life, too — shop signs, notices to employees, and students’ papers are all fraught with errors.

So, let’s go back to 7th grade, shall we? (Or, we could go back to my sophomore [second] year in college, and my junior-level Shakespeare class. After we turned in our first papers, our professor had to give us a mini-lesson on contractions ["it's"] and the proper use of dashes ["broken-looking-glass eyes"]. I hope that other people were as embarrassed as I was to be receiving a lecture on the difference between “its” and “it’s” at the age of 20.) Anyway. There is a difference between “your” and “you’re,” “it’s” and “its.” Think about it — “your shoes”? Is another way of saying “the shoes belonging to you.” “You’re shoes”? Equals “you are shoes.” Does that make sense? I thought not. That little apostrophe means something, damn it!

Obviously, not everyone has an innate understanding of English grammar, just as I do not have an innate understanding of math. But we communicate with words, not numbers. Every day, we write, even if it’s just a bunch of emails to our friends. How will someone be taken seriously if they cannot construct a basic sentence, if they never use contractions or plural possessives properly? Case in point: I worked in a deli for a while, and we always had a pile of dirty dishes in the break room. One day, the store manager posted a note that read, “Please do not leave you’re dirty dishes. It is rude to see them in the morning.” Aside from being grammatically incorrect (“you are dirty dishes”? Oh, really? I am? That’s news to me!), it sounds idiotic. (I’d always suspected that I was more intelligent than my manager, but that confirmed it.) Also, I just got an assignment that asks us to practice certain exercises until we are “confidant” that our answers are correct. So, you’re saying that you’d like me to bond with my answers until we can trust each other? The problem with spell check is that it doesn’t catch homo…homo…not homonyms…not homographs…not homophones. Well, I was going to say that perhaps my professor thought that “confident” and “confidant” were pronounced the same way, which means that they would be homophones, but they’re not, so really, it was just an error. Anyway, my point is that it’s hard to take someone seriously if they write like a second-grader.

Moving on to spelling. Misspelled words don’t bother me as much as improperly used contractions or plural possessives, and I can understand the difficulties inherent in spelling English-language words. Our language is not governed by logic when it comes to spelling. Still, there are some words that are fairly commonly used that are also fairly frequently misspelled, and it kind of drives me nuts after a while.

Let’s put these to rest, ok?
1. Blatant. Not “blatent.”
2. Tomorrow. Not “tamorrow,” “tommorrow,” or “tomorow.”
3. Tattoo. Not “tatoo.”
4. Embarrassed. Not “embarassed” or “embarrased.” Two r’s, two s’s.
5. Definite. Not “definate.”

And, I’m done. I would imagine that approximately zero people are still reading this, but that’s ok. I just had to get it off my chest.

(But before I go, let me share with you one of my best and worst academic experiences, which occurred in the same Shakespeare class as the grammar lesson. I got back a paper that had received a C+. The professor wrote some comment on it, the gist of which was, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read a paper with so few grammatical and stylistic errors. You are a good writer. The content of this paper, however, leaves something to be desired.” Basically, I saved myself from failing the paper entirely by knowing how to string words together. I was both proud and ashamed of myself for that.)