Thursday, December 11, 2008

Am I neurotic, or what?

Okay, I've got my holiday rant out of my system (hey, Jill, don't take it personally, ok, you know I love your family dearly...if it was my own cousin, I'd have still blogged about it, I was just that bebuggered!) so I'll move on.

Teri started it...and then posed a challenge for others to blog about their own neuroses (I still can't use the spelling 'neurosis' for the plural, Teri, I just *can't*, it's frying my brain! LOL), so since I'm having another one of those brain-dead days...sure, why not?

One of my biggest "issues" as my family likes to say is that I'm a grammar/spelling fanatic. A word nerd. Jon actually threatened to buy me a tee shirt once that said "Grammar Police". Well yeah, ok, sure...make fun of the one who wants people to speak and write properly. I've told my kids that if there's one surefire way to get me weilding a red pen, it's to get their/they're/there mixed up or to misuse your/you're. It's something they've pretty much known from birth that I'm completely obsessive about, and now I'm avoiding Kelsey's blog because she TOTALLY BUTCHERED all the grammar and spelling rules I've enforced in her writing over the last however many years that she's been writing. I've been known to edit my own blog post up to ten times AFTER I published it. Webster's dictionary-people offended me personally when they started to include such atrocities as "ain't" in newer dictionaries, and sometimes I just have to shut my ears and run away in agony when I'm around a group of people who don't seem to know how to use proper verbage.

It's a personal belief of mine that using profanity is a symptom of a poor vocabulary. Why else would you need to rely on "eff-n" this-or-that unless you just didn't have any adequate adverbs or adjectives in your memory banks?

Oh, and people, for the love of all that is proper English, PLEASE learn how to use your apostrophes! Those little punctuation marks are not supposed to show plurality except in very specific cases, such as abbreviations like cd's, ABC's, 123's, and tv's. NOT the Jones's, the Smith's, or the Campbell's, unless you're talking about something that belongs TO the Joneses, the Smiths, or the Campbells. "Happy Holiday's" is NOT correct, sorry! (Just say "Merry Christmas, even if it's not PC...less possibility for grammatical error!)

Is grammar not taught in school anymore? It just amazed me to learn that people whose native language is NOT English can somehow have better grammar than we Americans do. Are we forever stuck in grammar pre-k as a nation? Yes, I know I still leave my participles dangling now and then. I know I goof up, and I do still use sentence fragments in my writing for effect. I'm still a stickler for correct usage and spelling. I'll not apologize for that, either! I'll also continue to insist on proper grammar and spelling from my own children, I'm not bending!

For the record, the worst example of the lack of good education was a sign on a vending machine, penned by a Wal-Mart employee, that read "Borken, Do Nut Used."

I can still feel the thud of my neurotic, grammar-fanatic's head hitting the floor that day.

So what's your neurosis?

2 comments:

Kathleen said...

I believe the two of us were cut from the same diagrammed sentence!! I email people whose websites have errors. I contacted one gentleman about his horrifically written book...and got an editing/writing gig out of it! Signs, menus...I shudder when I see how many errors are out there! The world should be thankful for the Grammar Police!!

Qtpies7 said...

You two can save the emails on my grammar and spelling, lol. I won't listen. It is not that I don't appreciate proper grammar, because I do. But blogging is supposed to be free-spirited, straight from the hip. Sometimes straight from the hip doesn't come out properly.

I do have a thing about commas though. People, take a course! Oh, the over use, the under use, the improper use!

But I don't email people about it.

I have a lot of neurotic tendancies, so I probably shouldn't spill the beans. I don't want to be sent away.

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