This post is dedicated to Miss Smith.
Most people assume that once English teachers leave the confines of their classrooms, they continue obsessively proofreading wherever they go. You know, they take out their Sharpies mid-squat in the bathroom stalls and place an 're to the "your a b--ch." Or they ask for the manager at Red Robin because they were a little too heavy with the apostrophes on their nacho's. Or they giggle with glee when they find a red pen in their purses to more effectively correct the errors in the church bulletins (far more entertaining than sudoku could ever be).
I was going to write about being a nerd. I was inspired by my evening of tootling around on the computer with Lord of the Rings playing on the TV in the background. I then reached for a cookie and couldn't help but notice that my sinful little mini sandwiches are called Double Stuf Oreos. And I think it was at that point the English teacher in me began to rage. I inhaled dramatically and sort of got some cookie crumbs lodged in my lungs or something. I started mumbling about how it's no wonder my students can't spell worth sheet. I automatically had a list run through my head of all the companies trying to be all hip and stuf with their marketing. Like, for instance, I hate it when restaurants write "late nite" on their signs. Oooh, what about "drive thru?" Ca man! Put a little more f into the "effing" part of market-effing-strategy.
You can check out the messed up grocers' signs to test your editing skills. It's fun.
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3 comments:
Oh man! This post warms the cockles of my heart! Roomie told me about it, since, of course, I'm still fasting facebook for Lent. But seriously, I just spent multiple lessons with my English 10 class going over the first chapter of Lynne Truss's book! And I told them of my deep hatred for those dang signs in stores that say: "Smile your on camera" (there we have the double sin of misspelling "you're" AND missing the comma after "smile").
Anyway, thank you, dear friend, for also being so vehemently opposed to the scourge of horrible spelling and punctuation!
Wanna (sic) hear something wild? I did a boot 'round the net on an impulse to see where we get OK from. I couldn't figure it out, and then when I discovered its (so tempted to put an apostrophe there) origin, I was stunned. Stunned!
Back in the 1840s there was a movement to be hip and funky. (They probably didn't call it that -- actually I can't imagine what lexicon would be applicable in the 1840s for 'cool'. Perhaps 'culturally relevant'...?) Anyway, they ended up taking regular phrases, giving them an alternate spelling -- like "no use" became "know yuse". And then they would only extract the initials. And then they would publish the initials in places like newspapers. OK really stands for "oll korrect", or "all correct" as we say subsequent to the outlandish 1840s.
My point? If English can survive that episode, it can pretty much survive pretty much anything! lol ttyl etc. :-)
My biggest pet peeve in this regard... worship music on powerpoint. If we're worshipping a perfect God - can't we put just a little more effort into correcting reoccurring mistakes?
Please?
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