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".

So, I failed OS. I'm on AcPro, so I can't do completely horrible next semester. Shouldn't be a problem, though. OS with Choi should be easier than with C-K, and my other classes shouldn't be too hard.

I need to figure something out about Comp. Admin., though. OS is a prereq., so it dropped from my schedule when I failed. Maybe I can talk the teacher into letting me take it anyway--I did well on the programming assignments, have Solaris user experience, Linux administration experience, and am re-taking OS concurrently--but I don't know her, so who knows. If not, I will have to find some other class(es) to take instead.

I'm definitely here for five years. I haven't been taking enough credits/semester to do four years--at least without killing myself after one 18+ credit semester--so that's that. I might make it six years and go for a second degree while I'm here...

Anyone in Ann Arbor want to hang out sometime?

Well, according to Alltel's coverage map ("This map is only a representation of coverage area ... we do not guarantee coverage... blah blah blah") my phone should work in almost all of Michigan and Wisconsin, plus a nice swath through Minnesota (twin cities) and a little into Ohio (Toledo), other than a few random, small patches here and there where there is no civilization. Outside of that it is roaming in the rest of the country, and the tip of the thumb.

Anyway, on the way down south, I was going to make a call around Flint, but my phone had no service. I checked again a few times before I reached Ann Arbor, but it didn't work. Anywhere. Not in Flint, not in Ann Arbor, not at my grandmother's house in Royal Oak, nowhere. The only time I was able to use my phone downstate was when we went to pick my sister up from Kalamazoo. Once we got west of Chelsea my phone worked perfectly. The area between Lake Erie, Flint, and Chelsea is a pretty damn big area. My phone doesn't work at home in Ann Arbor, it doesn't work in the Detroit area, and it doesn't work for a large portion of my drive to/from Houghton.

Chelsea is 10 miles west of Ann Arbor...

This just isn't my week. Car is back at the shop, new filter has been fed-exed from Saturn of Ann Arbor. Should be here *saturday* (no overnight to Houghton). It is now 36 degrees out, with a 50% chance of snow. Fortunately, it isn't raining. Unfortunately, I tripped yesterday and twisted my ankle. Riding my bike to campus is going to be REALLY fun today...

NOT!

So, I picked up the car today. Yeah. $442.15 for a tow to the shop, and a new fuel pump. I heard the fuel pump running when I was attempting to diagnose the problem in the parking lot Saturday morning, so I determined that the fuel pump was indeed working, and since there was spark on all four cylinders, it was likely a clog or a leak in the fuel system. Since I could smell NO gas, even with the spark plugs removed, I determined that it was not a leak, but rather a clog, and, since my mother said she has no idea if the fuel filter has been replaced, ever, (100,000+ miles), determined that it was most likely the fuel filter.

The shop said "fuel pump". I figured, "Well, I guess it is possible for a fuel pump to make a noise and still not work. After all, maybe the motor driving it is turning, but is no longer attached to anything, and these guys are supposed to know more about cars than a Computer Science major..." and accepted their diagnosis. I asked them to replace the filter, too, as the one in there, even if it is not the current problem, could become a problem in the near future.

They told me, "we do not have one in stock for your [Mother's] car, and our supplier is backordered indefinitely".

"Okay, fine. I'll just pick the car up tomorrow, my mom can deal with the fuel filter when she gets the car back to Ann Arbor."

Well, tomorrow is today. I ride my bike back from campus at 11, walk across the bridge to Hancock, pay for the repairs (with my Mother's credit card, luckily), and drive it back to the house. Works like a champ. I drive it to my class at noon, and back to the house without a hitch. Two and one-half hours later, ten minutes before my OS exam, I go out to the car, put the key in the ignition, and...

...you guessed it. Nothing. Engine turns over, but doesn't catch. Exactly the same as Friday night. Shit. I hop on my bike, and make record time back to campus, arrive at my OS exam panting, call the repair place to tell them the repair didn't hold, and to expect a call when I get back from class to have the car towed back to the shop. After the exam*, I hopped on my bike, and rode back to the house. Of course, halfway back, it started raining cats and dogs. I arrived at the house sopping wet, called for a tow truck, and here I am, still waiting... still waiting...

*The exam didn't go too well. I understood most of the stuff, but I think I made a stupid mistake on the second-from-the-last problem, that will probably get me docked a huge number of points, and I was not able to finish the last problem.

So, my parents drove up for the weekend. After driving 10 hours with no problems at all, they joined me for dinner at the Library. When we finished, we went back out to the car, and it would not start. Push-starting (manual transmission) had no effect. The car was cranking, but didn't even sound like it was trying to catch. I pulled a couple of spark plugs, and found that it was indeed getting spark on both coil packs, so it must be a fuel system problem. As I didn't really feel like crawling under the car in a ditch, instead of joining my parents on a tour of the Quincy Mine, we had the car towed.

So now my car is in Ann Arbor, and I am going to pick my mom's car up from the shop tomorrow. In the meantime, I have been riding my bike to classes. In the rain. And the weekend after next should be fun, when I drive to Mackinaw City to swap cars with my mom.

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.