"Grammar Nazi"

I'm not sure when it happened, or even really why it happened, but somewhere along the way I became a grammar and spelling nazi. Not that I'm goose-stepping around the place, shouting at people who abuse the English language with some sort of faux-German accent. No, I just get exceptionally annoyed at people who make very basic errors. Y'know, the sort of errors you're supposed to stop making when you're in like the third grade, because they actually teach you how to write proper English.

I see it on a daily basis at work. Admittedly, some of the athletes are from foreign countries, and don't speak English very well. That, I can handle. English is a hard langauge to learn if you're not native to it. But native speakers (i.e., anyone in Britain or most of North America, including the United States and Canada) have no excuse. I've actually seen people use the phrase "we was" in a paper. Honestly. It sickens me--it's called noun-verb agreement, folks. The noun and the verb have to have the same singular/plural setting; that is, if the noun is plural, as the word "we" is, then the verb has to be plural as well. Some folks just don't seem to get it.

Or basic spelling. Honestly, when did you learn to spell the word "writing?" Did you learn? I honestly think some people didn't. I've actually seen it spelt "writeing." English Spelling 101: you don't just add the "ing" to a word that ends in "e," you have to drop the "e" first. And homophones--just because words sound the same does not mean they have interchangeable meanings! "There" is not the same as "their" or "they're;" "your" and "you're" have separate meanings; "too," "two," and "to" are all different words! You've no idea how many papers I see daily that make these mistakes. Constantly. I'm pretty sure that when I was in elementary and junior high, I was taught proper spelling and grammar. Surely they still teach that in school? I mean, I know the quality of education has decreased a bit, but that much in just the few short years that separate me from undergraduates? I doubt it. Clif and Scott, both undergrads themselves, seem fully capable of forming coherent, grammatically correct sentences. So why can't anyone else?

What's worse is the way that the internet has caused language skills to deteriorate. Remember when we actually had some sort of punctuation at the end of a sentence? Well, instant messenger programs seem to be killing punctuation and capitalization. I've even noticed myself doing it when using messenger programs--whenever I reach a place when I would use a period, I usually just hit enter and count that as a full stop. While this does work, to an extent, it still annoys me that I've gotten too lazy to actually hit one more key to make a letter a capital or to add a period to the end of a sentence. And what the hell is with netspeak slang? I know people who actually think that crap is cool or clever. I thought L33+ was cool the first time I saw it on [url=http://www.megatokyo.com]Megatokyo[/url]. That was three years ago, and I know for a fact (from reading rants on the website) that Piro, the artist for said glorious comic, blames himself for the proliferation of that perversion of the English language. A hint to all you "l33+ |-|@xx0r5" out there--you sound like an idiot epileptic monkey. Stop it.

I swear, leaving language in the hands of today's youth is like handing a priceless vase to an infant: it's gonna get broken, and what you end up with won't be language or a vase, but something shattered, a thousand tiny fragments that no longer form anything coherent or worthwhile. We'll end up with something far worse than Ebonics or Esperanto--we'll end up with shitty English. Really shitty English. I, for one, am going to fight to my last breath to defend language that makes sense.

~chaos cricket

Song of the Moment: Toad the Wet Sprocket, "Dam Would Break"