As someone who went through a moderate amount of a college journalism major before switching to something a little less...stressful, I have grown increasingly appalled by not only how much our grasp of grammar seems to be slipping away from us as a culture, but how much we apparently don't even care that we're showing off our mistakes.
It takes a certain amount of grammatical mastery before I even take a person or publication seriously; I admit my bias right there. I give a little leeway due to some personal experiences with people I know who are completely unable to spell or form coherent sentences on "paper" and are, in person, successful at their jobs and lives. But get your shit together, people.
The point is, that language is a tool. It's a tool that allows you to show attributes about your point of view, intellect, or personality that you don't otherwise have to spell out to a reader. It allows you to make a statement about yourself by your correct or incorrect usage of words, concepts and phrases and slang. It's a tool that lets me know if you're inherently racist and ignorant or well-educated and full of insight. Language is so strongly tied to emotion, is so powerful, and we cast it around casually without regard and with shameful abandon.
We all have the crutch of spell-checkers, oft-intrusive squiggly green and red underlines, and even that fucking MS Office paper clip to help us out. To my dismay, there is a trend in word processing to make assumption as to the writer's intent and to just automatically substitute a correctly spelled best-guessed word in place of a perceived incorrectly spelled word without so much as the typist even making notice of it. This much infuriates me. You may never actually realize how to spell certain words, because each time you make the mistake it is auto-corrected. What happens when you have to make a sign. No squiggles to help you now, lazy butt!
I have noticed an increased number of spelling mistakes on actual printed and approved final documents. Menus, signs, business cards... I even saw one on a television game show last night. I have seen them in recipes printed in magazines that are distributed to tens of thousands of people. Why am I going to do business with you when you can't even spell your street name? Guinness is spelled just like that. Lavender does not end in "AR". A LOT of things don't end in "AR". It's like one perpetual unintentional pirate joke after another.
I SAW SHERBET SPELLED LIKE SHERBERT. Seriously?! Sherbert?! This was not even at a Chinese restaurant, this was on television.
Chinese restaurants are exempt from this note, thanks.
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