Have you ever misspelled the word “Grammar”?
Whoops!! I just did!! Up there!! In the title of this freakin’ post about grammar!! DAMMIT!!!
People get really upset about bad grammar, but people also get really upset about what we who don’t really spell real good or talk all professional and whatnot call “The Grammar Police”.
They’ve been around for years…
I don’t know that I could’ve ever been convicted of being a Grammar Sheriff but I do know people who could be. Is that a bad thing? No… just so as long as the misspelling party is willing to accept the fact that they made a mistake. Don’t tell someone who probably doesn’t care that they spelled “misspell” with only one “s” if they is not interested because they don’t not write good.
Well, I’m here to tell you that I make more grammatical errors than Jenna Jameson has made regrettable decisions in her life. I suck at grammar. In fact, if it weren’t for spellcheck I would be continuing to try and spell grammar as “G-R-A-M-M-E-R”. The only reason I keep spelling it right is because my computer helps me not look like an idiot.
However, I do care about how I come across. I think of myself as pretty well educated and want to be taken seriously. I want you to pick up what I’m laying down without having to roll your eyes and my grammatical blemishes but also respect that perhaps sometimes I make mistakes. So, if you don’t mind, if you ever… EVER… catch a glaring, obvious misuse of a phrase or grammatical error worth telling me about please do so. I want to write well.
But I also want you to not be the grammar police. I would like you to think of yourself as the grammar grandma:
“Oh dear honey! I do believe you made a little mistake right there! Correct it and I’ll make a batch of my special brownies! Grandma loves you.”
Correct me on my final product. I don’t want my post to look like this t-shirt:
I bought this shirt because it’s in brand new condition and it has a vintage style look to it. It also has the Coca-Cola logo on it and people go ape-shit over Coca-Cola stuff so I bought with about a $7 “cha-ching” going off in my head without really reading the graphics.
Well, upon closer inspection it appears as the text for this t-shirt was written by Dan Quayle:
I have no idea what “awubding” means or what a “narathon dancer” is among other things.
Wait… is this Coca-Cola or “Coca-Coca”? Also, there are two periods after “CO” and there are two commas after….. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I CAN’T TAKE IT IT’S JUST SO WRONG!! EVEN FOR ME!! A BAD GRAMMAR PERSON!!
To make matters worse, the company that actually made this shirt is named this:
I went through the trouble of looking up “XINCHENGYIZU” to see if there was a company named XINCHENGYIZU. Maybe it was some sort of Chinese company or XINCHENGYIZU stood for something… although I couldn’t image what.
Is someone just trying to fuck with me?
I mean, there might actually be an eclectic t-shirt collector out there who enjoys buying t-shirts with grammatical errors on them (I hope) but I’m kinda pissed because someone went through the trouble of printing this without having the decency to check the graphic and make sure everything was kosher. I mean, who does that? I guess companies named “XINCHENGYIZU”.
So, to conclude my point: I don’t want to be like XINCHENGYIZU. Also, I don’t want you to be like me simply buying into a t-shirt because it looks like something else. In this case, you’re buying into this blog as a quick escape you may have from your daily grind at work:
“I’m going to see what that dork Chris is writing about on the Holy Idea Tees blog for about five minutes here while I scratch my balls.” You might tell yourself.
If you’re a new mom it might go something like this, “Oh, the baby just fell asleep. I’m going to read what interesting crap Holy Idea Tees has been able to correlate with a t-shirt today.”
The last thing I want is for the five minutes you take to read what I have to say to be catastrophically ruined because I used “their” instead of “there” (which I’ll never do… I promise).
In conclusion, thanks for reading and don’t be scared to offer advice to me on what you think might look better (just don’t be an asshole about it).
Holy Idea Tees 