Thursday, October 7, 2010

Grammar Police

I fully admit that I'm prone to the overuse of commas (and parenthetical remarks), but that doesn't stop me from becoming excessively irritated when I run into a few of the more common grammatical errors that plague written communication these days. I very nearly had to quit facebook after receiving my hundredth notification that one of my friends had taken a quiz containing "your" (meaning "you are") as part of the results. "Your a good person/guy magnet/movie star..." Aaaghh. Make it stop!

Maybe it's a side-effect of being surrounded by a CUL8R text generation whose most formal method of communication is email, but regardless (not to be confused with "irregardless"), if I see one more college-educated person mistakenly interchange "there" and "their" (or especially "they're") I won't be responsible for my actions.

And as long as we're discussing things that bother me, nothing brings on a neck-scrunching convulsion faster than an apostrophe unnecessarily parked at the end of an unsuspecting word: grape's, for example, or tomato's. Or a picture of said "tomato's" that says "A picture of the tomato's and I." It's me! Me. Me. Me.

The only problem with my revealing this grammar-related neurosis is that now you know how to torture me. Lock me in a room and make me listen to tapes of someone saying, "Her and me ec-scaped" or "I could care less" and it will be five seconds, tops, before I'm curled up in the fetal position whimpering about the proper usage of "it's" versus "its".

Yeah, I'm asking for it. I fully expect a slew of comments pointing out my sentence fragments and misplaced quotation marks. And the fact that I just started this sentence with "and".

I never said my neurosis was hypocrisy-free.

6 comments:

fiona said...

Your so write, I just can't stand when people don't know there grammar! I mean, its common sense! Comma's, are expecially, and I mean, expecially, used way to much. Proofread you're stuff, people! I can't be everywhere.

(haha, I almost pushed post and then saw I left the period off the second-too-last sentence. Helllooo, run-on! That would be ironic in this comment!)

David said...

Great post Bonnie. And Fiona I was on the floor laughing at your response!

David

Megan B ♥ said...

I feel you're pane. Thats the kind of stuf that makes me nutz-o.

What about the difference between then and than? Or a sister who insists on spelling height as "hight". Or ornery as honery. Or.... I could go on. Its and it's. Or my favorite is one that Justin's whole family does. When playing games: "I'm gonna win you!" or "I won you three times fair and square!" Really? You won me? Are you going to mount my head on your wall? My parents were grammatical nazis and it makes my existence in the world painful at times.

That being said, I'm ain't perfect either.

Cath said...

You make me laugh. My latest bug - last names like these cookies are for... "The Overly's" - the Overly's what?

The Davis Clan said...

Bonnie I feel your pain. Growing up my mom would lecture us on the use of these and those vs these ones and those ones. I can't say that I am perfect, but at least get the basics right.

Sara said...

Fiona - you win the comment prize of the year!

It makes me think of the grammar diatribe/essay "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" (or is it Eats Shoots and Leaves ... it depends).