Your Stupid

(Don’t take English for granite.)
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Let’s admit it. Everybody has baggage. Everybody has issues. My big bale of baggage includes being a bigot. Well, that and being an aggravated addict of alliteration. Allegedly.

However, my particular bigotry baggage doesn’t discriminate due to race, or gender, or age, or why that woman over there thought it was a good idea to wear that particular fashion combination to a Wal-Mart.

I am a language bigot.

I’m a great big fan of the English language, even after Americans got their hands on it and started calling a bonnet a “hood” and a boot a “trunk“ (although the jury’s still out on what we’ve done with “queen”). Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have always been some of my favorite things, along with Chinese carry-out.

Mindy you, I’m not a purist – I’m not smart enough to be flawless. I don’t pretend my grammar is perfect; for example, just a few seconds ago, I submitted “Allegedly.” as a complete sentence, a crime which could get me stoned by any number of cringing high school English teachers that heard it. I can never determine when someone has committed a gerund. I can’t tell you the difference between a past participle tense, a past perfect progressive tense, and just being tense.

But I know it’s not spelled “tents.”

Part of my “language bigotry” baggage came from my mother, who handed me my first book during childbirth (it was a collection of Mark Twain essays). My mom, as a member of the final generation of moms before the internet came along, responded to my endless childhood questions with the phrase “Go look it up” approximately seven hundred thousand times. I was a fully grown adult before I ever heard anyone say “Google it” or “Ask Alexa.” Go look it up meant a child should consult, not an $800 phone, but actual, physical books known as dictionaries and encyclopedias.

And then the child would … hang on to something here … then the child would go outside to play – without a helmet. And we all survived! In those rare cases when a child did experience blunt force trauma to the head, well, no worries – they could always pursue a career in politics.

But now we have the world wide web, and online media, and those two are rapidly doing to the English language what MTV did to music. I’m not sure this is progress.

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English, 17th Century

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.

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English, 19th Century

Truth is might and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.

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English, 21st Century

omg r u going 2 the party LOL

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Some of the rushed, sloppy nonsense thumb-typed in social media makes my teeth hurt. Once, during one of my bigotry outbreaks, someone on facebook actually responded – and I quote – “on facebook, spelling don’t count.” That person is dead now, and my lawyer advises me to talk about something else.

Maybe you’re like me, and you have your own list of teeth-clenchers. Here are a few of the more grating transgressions: