Viewing Single Post From: Fastidious Spelling Snobs Pushed Over the Edge

Viewing Single Post From: Fastidious Spelling Snobs Pushed Over the Edge
Enspire	Feb 9 2009, 11:26 PM
The Chill Posts: 59 Group: VIP Member #13 Joined: Feb 5, 2009 Gender Male Religion Atheism Political View Liberal/Centrist Time Zone GMT-8 (Pacific Standard Time)	Full Article Fastidious Spelling Snobs Pushed Over the Edge Books, blogs and obsessiveness mark a brand-new war of the words Some people avoid Krispy Kreme because of the calories. Angela Nickerson won’t go there because of the Ks. “I confess, I’m a spelling, grammar and punctuation snob,” says the 35-year-old travel writer from Sacramento, Calif. “And I won’t patronize businesses with misspelled signs. It’s like hearing fingernails running down a chalkboard.” Life isn’t easy for language lovers such as Nickerson. Over the past decade, her beloved mother tongue has been mashed, mangled and mistreated by everyone from a sitting president to a squadron of texting preteens. Misspelled menus have become the stuff of bad dreams. (Try our Sweat and Sour Chicken!) Punctuation is not only hit-and-miss, it’s potentially hazardous. (Employees must “wash hands.”) But while blunders and bloopers have ever exasperated the spelling snobs and grammar grunions of the world, our recent woes — housing foreclosures, massive layoffs, rising debt and war — may be ratcheting up the pressure some feel to seize control of something (anything!), even if it’s just a properly placed comma. “Hanging on to some kind of rule might be comforting to people,” says Bethany Keeley, a grad student from Athens, Ga., who runs The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. “People are looking for something they can control and ‘What should we do about our foreign policy?’ is a lot more complicated a question than ‘Should the period go inside or outside the quotation mark?’ ” -MSNBC ... What do you all think? I really can't believe that some people would chose to boycott a restaurant or consumer service because of simple grammar errors like the ones talked about in the article. However, I am saddened by the watered-down English that is used across the net and in verbal conversations. Even in a place like this we use many less words than a few hundred years previously. I like good grammar, but I won't go and correct someone when they make a simple mistake, unless of course I'm in a bad mood and trying to anger them. Do you think that English is becoming to watered down and that it is sad that so many words are left unused today? I am mostly afraid of something happening on the equivalency of newspeak in 1984. That would be a nightmare. But I don't really think that something like that will happen because language is such a huge part of every culture and I don't believe that its people would easily give it up. Edited by Enspire, Feb 9 2009, 11:27 PM.
	"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me" -1984

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