I spoke to the youngin’...

...and in case you were wondering, it won’t work. We haven’t gotten past the speaking stage and we won’t. I don’t care how old he is, I can’t handle the disparity in our vernacular. He followed up one too many sentences with, “Do you know what I’m saying?”

I truly believe that I could become homicidal after enough of that, do you know what I’m saying? I don’t know if that is age or regional or educational. It’s just a pet peeve of mine. Anyone can make a few mistakes here and there. Personally, I am glad that I have spell check...and a dictionary...and a thesaurus. But if you-

A. Mangle the entire language.

and are,

B. Too ignorant to care,

I have a problem. The youngin’ wasn’t THAT bad and, in all fairness, he really did try not to do it. Far too many people just don’t care and think you a snob for pointing out an error in the first place. But sometimes, within the confines of an appropriate relationship, it is the right thing to do. For example, a parent should correct a child’s use of “me’s” instead of “mine”. My father still corrects me. But I am now as astute as he is in picking up on grammatical errors, and Daddy do make some. I love that.

I want to be corrected. I appreciate it. It challenges me not to make the mistake in the first place. So, if ever you should find an error, let me know. After I post something, I always find glaring errors and I can’t get to the edit screen quickly enough. But some things just get by me and all of my deft computer assistance.

Is it me or are people putting less emphasis on grammar lately? It grates on my nerves to hear someone use the word “whenever” improperly. They will say, “Whenever I ate breakfast this morning, my front tooth finally broke off.” Well, don’t you KNOW when your tooth broke off?Why would you say “whenever”? If you said, “Whenever I eat breakfast, one of my teeth falls out.”, that would make sense. But to use “whenever” in reference to an established time is just plain wrong.

Also, people seem to be overusing the word “had” lately. “She had told me that I had better not screw her husband in her bed.” Both “hads” in that sentence were totally unnecessary.

One of the more iniquitous things that this wicked step-mother did was correct grammar. That left me pretty much constantly correcting people. I tried to back off now and then. I have now that they are adults (as well as out of my life, isn‘t that a shame?) but you want so much more for your children. I don’t care how impressive your resume, if you cannot speak well in certain situations, you will not get as far as someone with lesser credentials who can. There are always exceptions to the rule but in general, the ability to speak properly will serve you well. If you are good enough, you can dumb yourself down if you have to. But if you don’t have the tools to speak well, there’s no way to smarten yourself up.

So, that’s why I like to be corrected. I don’t understand why anyone would mind. You’d want somebody to tell you if you had a huge hunk of cucumber peel on your tooth, why wouldn’t you want a friend to point out a major breach of grammatical rules?

Would you mind? How do you feel when somebody corrects your grammar?

I think that most people care quite a bit about their own grammatical competence. But, whenever I turned Jerry Springer on this morning, I had seen that they had showed another two bit whore who had screwed another woman’s man.

Do you know what I’m saying?

Meg