I have been noticing a disturbing trend. It seems that grammar, punctuation and spelling are on the decline in print. It seems as if in every book I read, I find a missing period or a misspelled word. I find typos in newspaper articles all the time. Today I saw a headline reading “Snowmobilers Go Father” instead of “Snowmobilers Go Farther”.
I’m not saying that everything always has to be in the Queen’s English. I understand that personal emails and even blog entries might have the occasional error, and that’s okay with me. There are people who make money writing and proofreading, though, and I think that they should have to be pretty good at what they do. I have to be good at what I do if I want to keep my job. They could at least reread their work, or run a spell-checking program (although this isn’t perfect).
So why are these violations of language slipping past? Are these people overworked? Are they lazy? Is there just too much information being published? Am I just too anal? (Please, no one answer that—it’s rhetorical.)
I only raise this issue because I have a “bad grammar” radar lodged in my brain. (I think it may have replaced my hypothalamus.) My wife can verify that anytime I come across an English mistake, it may as well be in big, bold red letters, underlined thrice and packing heat. I am not exaggerating. It seriously trips me up when I am reading, as if I were interrupted by fingernails on a chalkboard. It is almost a painful experience for me. Don’t blame me for my ranting, then: I am a victim of this disease. I’m sure I’ll track down a name for it sometime.
In the meantime, I think some federal funding is in order. I obviously can’t work under these conditions. I deserve free money!
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1 comment:
That made me laugh -- partially because it's funny, partially because I, too, suffer from that disease.
I particularly enjoy the misuse of the various forms of: your, you're, to, too, two, their, they're, there, here, hear, lose, loose and the like.
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