Thursday, March 01, 2012

Anyone who knows me knows that I can be a bit... pedantic when it comes to spelling and grammar, and I will never deny that. My biggest pet peeve always has been and always will be the confusion between "your" and "you're" - that was taught in, what, third grade?

People use the excuse of "you know what I meant" or "it's just the internet", but here's the thing - in this increasingly digital world, so much of our communications are done via email or text and in those mediums, words are all we have - no facial expression, no special inflections, no hand gestures (obscene or otherwise) to add context, and if you want to get your message across clearly, doesn't it make more sense to try to make sense? Words matter.

And yesterday, a wrongly spelled, then wrongly autocorrected text put an entire school on lockdown - some kid texted that he was "gunna" be at school that day, autocorrect changed that to "gunman" and the freakout ensued from there.

First of all, the phrase is "going to", but I understand that in a text there is a character limit, so the generally accepted shortening of that phrase is "gonna" - had the kid texted "gonna", I doubt it would have been autocorrected into a threat (might have autocorrected to "gonorrhea" maybe, but that would have just prompted nothing more than a lecture about safe sex to the students). Correct spelling and grammar, y'all - it saves lives (maybe).

Labels: unrepentant grammar snob