Not "towed" persay, but for all intensive purposes, it's had it's fair shake of down-time.

*twitch*
*twitch*
*twitchtwitchtwitch*

(Cross posted to grammar_nazis)

So I just read Wired columnist Tony Long's rant about kids these days and their damn grammar. I couldn't agree more. As shown in an earlier post, the piss-poor grammar I see more and more every day is one of my pet peeves. How people can live their entire lives speaking a language, and still not understand it's basic rules confuses me to no end.

A choice quotation from the article:

But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It's important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It's important to maintain high standards. It's important to think before you write.

People constantly tell me that I am being too picky. "But the message gets across just fine, doesn't it?" they say. Yes, the message gets across, but it may not be the message you are trying to convey. When one "vomit[s] out of [his] fingers", as Long so eloquently put it, I am going to take it as a shibboleth of sorts. Depending on the exact nature of said vomit, along with other information I may know about him, I am going to assume that he is either a non-native speaker of the language, a dolt, or someone who does not give a rat's ass about the subject on which he is writing, his audience, or the English language.

Do you go to an interview at your local supermarket wearing a sweat-stained t-shirt and torn jeans, with matted hair, and smelling of unwashed flesh? No. That is not to say that you should show up wearing a suit and tie, but you should at least take a shower, shave, and wear khakis and a clean dress shirt. Similarly, you don't have to read and re-read every single sentence, then call in a gaggle of peer-editors to come up with something that is more-or-less grammatically correct. You just have to pay a little bit of attention to what you are saying, and actually learn all the rules your teachers tried to teach you in grade school.

In my opinion, the best way to learn how to write well is to read. Read a novel, or fifty, then read another. Read everything you can get your hands on. Classics, history, philosophy, poetry, popular novels, anything and everything. Always have a book with you, and another ready to pick up when you finish the one you are currently reading. Read it when you are riding the bus, sitting in an airplane, waiting for class to start, or sitting around doing nothing. In no time, you will accomplish several things: you will have new topics of conversation, especially among people with similar taste in books; you will greatly expand your vocabulary; your sub-concious catalogue of grammatical rules will be revised and expanded to more accurately reflect the English language; and you will always have something to do.

I think of e-mail, forums, and blogs in a different category than instant messaging services and IRC. While the former are generally longer documents, the latter are made up of single sentences. E-mail's obvious counterpart in the non-virtual world is a letter. Letters can be formal business letters, or friendly notes between friends. Either way, people generally put a fair deal of time into them, making certain that they do not have any misspellings, smudges, stains, and so forth. You don't throw a note scrawled on a dirty napkin into an envelope and call it a letter to your mother; why should you do the virtual equivalent with e-mail? Likewise, forum and blog posts are generally relatively long, containing several sentences, or even multiple paragraphs. They also have a much more "permanent" feeling to them than e-mail, stemming from the fact that most anything posted previously can be pulled up through archives as reference material in the future; thus, the same care ought to be put into them as would be put into a newspaper article, or opinion column, at least for posts about something relatively serious, as opposed to the typical "OMG I got SOOOOOOO drnk last fday" post.

Instant messaging, IRC, and SMS, on the other hand, should be likened more to verbal conversation, being much more informal and ephemeral than forum and blog posts. A certain amount of shorthand is to be expected, as are things like dropped articles, sentence fragments, and uncorrected typos. This is especially true of SMS, where speed and ease of entry on a twelve-key input device trumps things like punctuation and spelling. However, something is still to be said for being able to converse clearly and properly in an IRC or IM conversation, just as there is for talking clearly and properly in a verbal conversation. Using the right word in the right place, for example, is still important, as is close-to-proper spelling—it should at least LOOK somewhat close to the actual word. Just as you shouldn't use a word in verbal communication that you cannot pronounce worth a damn, you shouldn't use a word in written communication that you don't even know the letter with which it begins. I'll give you a hint: Walla [Walla] is a city in Washington, not a French word meaning "behold".

Why is it that people make so many mistakes in their writing? Did someone somewhere tell them that if two words sound the same, they ARE the same? I don't mind the occasional typo. Hell, I make them myself quite often. However, I am quite bothered by the trends in today's language toward homonym dyslexia, replacing words with single letters, apostrophe abuse, COMPLETE mangling of words, and so on. Here are a few examples:

Urk is a town in The Netherlands. It really irks me when people randomly put this in sentences.
Should of makes no sense. People should've learned this by now.
Just desserts. When I am in charge, people who say "just desserts" will get their just deserts.
Alot. I see this a lot. I do not understand what it is supposed to mean.

And of course, there is the ever-classic their/there/they're, to/too/two, et al. How people did not learn the proper use of these words by now is just beyond me. If you read ANYTHING, you will pick them up.

Then there are the people who use too many apostrophes. Some people use too few, but the VAST majority use too many. Hint: apostrophes are NOT used to make plurals, with ONE exception--when making the plural of a LOWERCASE letter, such as f's. Otherwise, don't use an apostrophe to make a plural. DVDs, 1960s, computers, none of them have an apostrophe. Use an apostrophe to make the possessive form of a noun, or to show missing letters in a contraction.

English spelling is not "illogical" or "contradictory". You just don't understand how it works. The English language has a HUGE vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages. These languages each have different rules for the spelling of words, so in order to know how to spell a word, you need to recognise the language from which it came, and reason out how to spell it with that in mind. If you cannot figure that out, make a reasonable effort to get somewhere close to the correct spelling of the word. Or, just LOOK THE WORD UP. We all need to use a dictionary from time to time, and the convenience of the internet means you have no excuse for horribly mangling a word. Minor misspellings are not a problem, just make the word reasonably recognisable so I don't have to squint at it for five minutes trying to sound it out for myself, and figure out what you are trying to say. This goes doubly for foreign idioms imported into English. The next time I see "walla" instead of "voila", or "se la vi" instead of "c'est la vie", I am going to scream.

Yes, language does change. It does not, however, go through radical changes because you wish to be lazy and ignore the accepted rules of grammar. It isn't as if your laziness saves you any time, either. I almost never think about grammar when I am writing. I just write what comes into my head. I rarely proof-read posts, which is why I miss typos and minor misspellings, but I don't think I make gross grammar mistakes very often. Do people write horribly to bother me? I don't see any other reason, as it seems to take extra effort to write poorly. If I try to write using "aim-speak", it takes me three or four times as long to write the same sentence, compared to simply writing it the way it pops into my head.