Grammar grumbles

Feb 7, 2013 update: I ain’t the only one!!! I mean…I am not the only one!!! Read on…

43 percent of singles say bad grammar is a turnoff

YES!!! In total agreement and loved reading the comments. *sigh* I feel like I belong in this community of haters…

Originally posted: Jan 30, 2013

I don’t have any near-future plans of having my name beside a Pulitzer or Man Booker Prize and while I ain’t no great writer, I sure do appreciate literary geniuses. You know what, let’s take it down a notch – you don’t need to be a literary genius, I just appreciate good writing. Actually, let’s just take it down to the basics, I appreciate good grammar.

Seeing anything otherwise causes some pretty serious internal fits…internal fits that, at times, makes its way out to the external world. Twitter has become a good release for my rants and placing myself behind a wall of semi-anonymity makes it easy to unload. I started following @ItsDaGrumpyCat because oh, how he brightens my day so! I feel like his thoughts are my thoughts…except if I want to keep up my happy, peppy, image that I’ve created for myself here in England (alter-ego) I need to keep most of these thoughts locked up. But it’s comforting to know that there’s someone out there who can, and will, freely voice my sentiments.

Oops, like the cat that I am, I’ve strayed from the original topic. The reason why I brought up ItsDaGrumpyCat, and how it relates to this post, is that apparently he feels the same way I do in regards to poor grammar. I’ve been re-tweeting his tweets because that gives me the safety barrier of pushing my thoughts out there without me directly saying, “I despise people who, after 15 years of schooling plus life experience, still can’t get simple grammar straight.”

Yes, ItsDaGrumpyCat, YES!!! You know me so well…

It’s bad enough when I see general spelling and grammar mistakes floating around my emails…my social media…my chat boxes…but when it starts to appear on professional business packaging, THAT’S when the shock/rage factor shoots up a bit as I think, “You git! This is your professional branding! Couldn’t you have taken the effort to have it proofread before distributing to thousands/millions of people!?”

When I see something spelled incorrectly or notice a major grammar mistake it’s definitely enough to turn me off from using that product if there’s a suitable alternative around.

Case Study 1:

Spot the mistake?

 

It was so hard to eat my noodles with the bag facing me...leering at me...taunting me...

This restaurant’s in Bath, England. Notice before I said I’d switch companies if there was a suitable alternative available? Well, in this case there’s no suitable alternative :( Bath’s lacking in good Asian cuisine, and finding bubble tea, especially GOOD bubble tea is scarce. Almost as scarce as good spelling and grammar.

Tonight’s Italian class consisted of learning restaurant etiquette, ordering dishes, faux-pas’ etc. Have you heard of the dish Spaghetti/Penne all’Arrabbiata? It’s pasta with spicy sauce (arrabbiata means ‘angry’ in Italian). My teacher told us today that if she sees on the menu that ‘arrabbiata’ has been spelled incorrectly (on menus it’s often missing either one of the double r’s or the double b’s) she won’t order it because “if it’s not spelled right it’s not cooked right!” Trust the Italians to feel as passionately as I do about misspellings 😉

I say this even though M spells gym ‘jym/jim’, ache ‘ake’, receipt ‘receit’…Don’t worry, I’m working on it. I’ve always been one to take on a challenge!