27Jun08 Of Grammar on the Internet

I understand that when communicating on the internet most people fall into using internet slang. When it comes to instant messaging, text messaging, or even talking within a game it’s understandable. What I don’t find acceptable are simple grammar and spelling mistakes. Things like your and you’re, there their and they’re, and to too and two. I really don’t see two misused as often as the others. Your and you’re are significantly more common than that. Is it really that difficult to know that the presence of an apostrophe (in these cases) indicate a contraction? When someone says something like “Well your just being stupid” who is the one who looks stupid? Often I feel the need to reply with “My stupid what?” because they’ve used the possessive form.

Then there’s the misspellings. I make my fair share of spelling mistakes but since I use Firefox I’m able to cut them out because of the built in spell checker. I’ve not delved in to IE7 or any other browser to really know if they have that as built in or add on capability. (Yes, I’m a Firefox user and really don’t care for IE much at all though I am aware a good portion of the population still uses it. This could be cause for another rant entirely on how often I hear people say “I get to the internet by clicking on the blue ‘E’” when I’ve asked them what browser they’re using.)

One thing that a spell checker can’t help is the choice of the wrong word. While there are many examples to choose from there are two that I’ve seen recently: bear and wary. Often whenever someone is wishing to ask someone to “bear with them” it will read “Bare with me for a moment.” Then you have wary. Just the other day I saw that someone had mentioned they were ‘weary’ of doing a certain task. Further reading indicated that they had never performed this task and were actually ‘wary’ of it.

As a final item: grammar in general. I was reading a news article online the other day and realized that one sentence made entirely no sense. It seemed as if someone had been copying and pasting some sentences in and somehow smashed two into one though that’s just a guess; there was no period at the end of the thought. In another article on the same site there were no spaces after the periods in one portion of the article. On yet another website I was bombarded by a multitude of misplaced commas. It was as if the author really had a thing going for commas and just threw them in after every few word.

I don’t claim to have perfect grammar all the time. It’s been years since I’ve had any type of grammar course to remind me about things like ending sentences in prepositions. (Though I do remember that one; do I always follow it? Probably not.) All of this reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from The Lord of the Rings movie:

“Anyways, you need people of intelligence on this type of mission…quest…thing.” – Pippin in The Fellowship of the Ring

All in all if you want to be taken seriously you should pay attention to your grammar and spelling. It speaks a lot about a person, even in this age of internet and texting slang. That’s my 2¢ on the matter.