fuyu | (no subject)

... I joke that I'd like to become an English teacher.

Some days I wonder if I'm really joking.

I'm much more lenient on speech, but if you are writing things down, then by god the majority of your writing had better be correctly capitalized, correctly punctuated, correctly spelled (with certain acceptable variants), and constructed in a way that makes sense, or I froth at the mouth.

Man, I would be the angriest, bitterest English teacher ever. Students would live in terror of me - save those who were already inclined to write properly, to whom I would probably be a shining hero. I would grade with no mercy. No, I will not give you a passing grade because you're on the football team, you will learn how to use the fucking comma or you will fail my class. I would probably end up losing my job, not because I was grading too harshly... but because when they told me that, I would go off ranting about the decline of communication and Don't You Think Education Is Important (You Bastards). I wouldn't say "you bastards". But I'd be thinking it very loudly.

Yeah. There are a few buttons that trigger my instant RAAAAAAAAAAGE. Language misuse is one of them. :D

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For the most part, I was that kid too. I grew out of the '4' and 'u' stage pretty fast. I just... Language misuse makes me want to strangle someone. I sound so alarmist when I rant about how Language Is The Foundation Of Civilization, Stop Undermining It, You're Going To Break The Civilized World, but... it's not that far from the truth, is it? You kepe tlaking lyke dis lol adn show no effort too fix ur mistaeks and where is that going to lead? Eventually to nobody in America having a fucking clue how to read anything that isn't written in netspeak. Ancient Greece had a really bad patch when nobody could read anything, and in ancient Egypt the scribes were extra super important! LANGUAGE IS NOT A TOY.

I keep hearing about a bill they've been trying to pass for...years, apparently, that would abolish the standardized spelling and replace it with more "intuitive" spelling.
Protesters outside the Senate with signs that read "Enuf if Enuf but Enough is Too Much", that sort of thing.

...surely they can't be SERIOUS? They don't see the PROBLEMS that might come from this sort of system?

That... just... kind of makes me cry. D: I mean, god, it's not like a single casual misspelling can CHANGE THE MEANING OF A SENTENCE or anything. My god.

And if you do that, kids'll just keep thinking "oh, spelling is optional", even kids that might otherwise SPELL CORRECTLY.

Gods on little pogo sticks.

Right? Not to mention that "intuitive" changes based on where you grew up.
When I lived in philly, it amused my boss at game stop constantly that I'd lived there for a year and had somehow managed to resist calling bottled water "aboddala wadder"
Same problem. What the hell is wadder? Pronunciation differences and people just..not knowing how to say things in the first place would mean that no one would understand anyone ever again

Proposed Bill #25546: Let's make all of America stupid. >

EXACTLY. DAMN IT. If we spell things the way we hear them, a person in New York and a person in Idaho are going to spell everything differently. T_T

*weeps* *weeps so much*

This is why I ended up using Yukari for the original post rather than the equally-fitting grammar whore icon. Yukari is batshit, but her RAGE!! was more illustrative and I suspect she'd sympathize with me on this too. XD

Well lordy. You ought'in'a hang out wit' maih family. What since we from Kentucky an' all.

This's how it'd sound what if we spelled evrythng like we said. Now, if'in you 'scuse me, I gots ta go back to Grampa's baccer farm.

(My dad actually does this when he writes letters. It's sheer comedy. No one else in human history spells "I" as "Ah".)

You're kidding, right?

Let us pass the "Americans are STUPID" bill. I'm sure it'll do so much to help us all.