Monday, January 23, 2006
My Beautiful Language, Buggery Of
This blogging lark is all a bit new to me, so I reserve the right to have the odd literary train wreck now and then.
Incidentally, I am a bit of a grammar nazi in real life however it seems wrong to do that in a blog. I’m drawn to the blogs which read as you expect them to sound in the writer’s head and it’s that style that interests me more than anything else so, whilst the urge to fight too much punctuation strikes me constantly, commas are meant more for a pause than to represent a clause. Therefore, Microsoft Word’s grammar checker can kiss my arse, along with that sodding paper clip. Anyway, when I’m stuck at work plodding through another proposal, why should a paper clip be so bloody happy ?
Anyway, it all irks me a little, this grammar-spelling stuff. When I was a kid I got one third of my 3 R’s either from newspapers, magazines or books. Now you could always count on those publications to be correctly edited and all the spelling mistakes would have been weeded out. Not so on that there interweb. In fact it seems that a substantial percentage of the English-speaking world’s population are barely literate.
We’ve all seen it… websight, “to” when there should be a “too”, and my favourite of all, the extremely-long-sentence-with-no-punctuation-whatsoever-and-good-Lord-not-a-capital-letter-in-sight-either. Is it a paragraph or is it a sentence ? Could I speak the entire thing without a pause or would I pass out ? Nobody has the right to butcher my beautiful language in such a fashion.
So what’s going to happen with all the kids that are now about 11 or 12 and are surfing the internet ? Will the dictionary change to officially recognize (bloody American spellchecker, that word has a ‘s’ in it !) websights, or will every CV I read in the future be such a mishmash of hacked up spellings that job candidates won’t even get through to an interview ?
Incidentally, to combat the rise of Singlish, a pidgin mix of a Chinese dialect and English, the Singapore Government have created the “Speak Good English” campaign. Nice one.
# posted by SideshowPete : 10:20 pm
